The time for rhetorical reservations is over. Things have to be called by their name to make it possible for a co-ordinated democratic reaction to be initiated, above all in the public services.

Liberalism was a doctrine derived from the philosophy of Enlightenment, at once political and economic, which aimed at imposing on the state the necessary distance for ensuring respect for liberties and the coming of democratic emancipation. It was the motor for the arrival, and the continuing progress, of Western democracies.

Neoliberalism is a form of economism in our day that strikes at every moment at every sector of our community. It is a form of extremism.

Fascism may be defined as the subordination of every part of the State to a totalitarian and nihilistic ideology.

I argue that neoliberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also every aspect of our thought.

The state is now at the disposal of the economy and of finance, which treat it as a subordinate and lord over it to an exte

nt that puts the common good in jeopardy.

The austerity that is demanded by the financial milieu has become a supreme value, replacing politics. Saving money precludes pursuing any other public objective. It is reaching the point where claims are being made that the principle of budgetary orthodoxy should be included in state constitutions. A mockery is being made of the notion of public service.

The nihilism that results from this makes possible the dismissal of universalism and the most evident humanistic values: solidarity, fraternity, integration and respect for all and for differences.

There is no place any more even for classical economic theory: work was formerly an element in demand, and to that extent there was respect for workers; international finance has made of it a mere adjustment variable.

Every totalitarianism starts as distortion of language, as in the novel by George Orwell. Neoliberalism has its Newspeak and strategies of communication that enable it to deform reality. In this spirit, every budgetary cut is represented as an instance of modernization of the sectors concerned. If some of the most deprived are no longer reimbursed for medical expenses and so stop visiting the dentist, this is modernization of social security in action!

Abstraction predominates in public discussion so as to occlude the implications for human beings.

Thus, in relation to migrants, it is imperative that the need for hosting them does not lead to public appeals that our finances could not accommodate. Is it In the same way that other individuals qualify for assistance out of considerations of national solidarity?

The cult of evaluation

Social Darwinism predominates, assigning the most stringent performance requirements to everyone and everything: to be weak is to fail. The foundations of our culture are overturned: every humanist premise is disqualified or demonetized because neoliberalism has the monopoly of rationality and realism. Margaret Thatcher said it in 1985: “There is no alternative.” Everything else is utopianism, unreason and regression. The virtue of debate and conflicting perspectives are discredited because history is ruled by necessity.

This subculture harbours an existential threat of its own: shortcomings of performance condemn one to disappearance while at the same time everyone is charged with inefficiency and obliged to justify everything. Trust is broken. Evaluation reigns, and with it the bureaucracy which imposes definition and research of a plethora of targets, and indicators with which one must comply. Creativity and the critical spirit are stifled by management. And everyone is beating his breast about the wastage and inertia of which he is guilty.

The neglect of justice

The neoliberal ideology generates a normativity that competes with the laws of parliament. The democratic power of law is compromised. Given that they represent a concrete embodiment of liberty and emancipation, and given the potential to prevent abuse that they impose, laws and procedures have begun to look like obstacles.

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The power of the judiciary, which has the ability to oppose the will of the ruling circles, must also be checkmated. The Belgian judicial system is in any case underfunded. In 2015 it came last in a European ranking that included all states located between the Atlantic and the Urals. In two years the government has managed to take away the independence given to it under the Constitution so that it can play the counterbalancing role citizens expect of it. The aim of this undertaking is clearly that there should no longer be justice in Belgium.

A caste above the Many

But the dominant class doesn’t prescribe for itself the same medicine it wants to see ordinary citizens taking: well-ordered austerity begins with others. The economist Thomas Piketty has perfectly described this in his study of inequality and capitalism in the twenty-first century (French edition, Seuil, 2013).

In spite of the crisis of 2008 and the hand-wringing that followed, nothing was done to police the financial community and submit them to the requirements of the common good. Who paid? Ordinary people, you and me.

And while the Belgian State consented to 7 billion-euro ten-year tax breaks for multinationals, ordinary litigants have seen surcharges imposed on access to justice (increased court fees, 21% taxation on legal fees). From now on, to obtain redress the victims of injustice are going to have to be rich.

All this in a state where the number of public representatives breaks all international records. In this particular area, no evaluation and no costs studies are reporting profit. One example: thirty years after the introduction of the federal system, the provincial institutions survive. Nobody can say what purpose they serve. Streamlining and the managerial ideology have conveniently stopped at the gates of the political world.

The security ideal

Terrorism, this other nihilism that exposes our weakness in affirming our values, is likely to aggravate the process by soon making it possible for all violations of our liberties, all violations of our rights, to circumvent the powerless qualified judges, further reducing social protection for the poor, who will be sacrificed to “the security ideal”.

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Salvation in commitment

These developments certainly threaten the foundations of our democracy, but do they condemn us to discouragement and despair?

Certainly not. 500 years ago, at the height of the defeats that brought down most Italian states with the imposition of foreign occupation for more than three centuries, Niccolo Machiavelli urged virtuous men to defy fate and stand up against the adversity of the times, to prefer action and daring to caution. The more tragic the situation, the more it necessitates action and the refusal to “give up” (The Prince, Chapters XXV and XXVI).

This is a teaching that is clearly required today. The determination of citizens attached to the radical of democratic values is an invaluable resource which has not yet revealed, at least in Belgium, its driving potential and power to change what is presented as inevitable. Through social networking and the power of the written word, everyone can now become involved, particularly when it comes to public services, universities, the student world, the judiciary and the Bar, in bringing the common good and social justice into the heart of public debate and the administration of the state and the community.

Neoliberalism is a species of fascism. It must be fought and humanism fully restored.

“One Ring to rule them all . . . and in the darkness bind them.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

World War II resulted in Europe being conquered, not by Berlin but by Washington.

The conquest was certain but not all at once. Washington’s conquest of Europe resulted from the Marshall Plan, from fears of Stalin’s Red Army that caused Europe to rely on Washington’s protection and to subordinate Europe’s militaries to Washington in NATO, from the replacement of the British pound as world reserve currency with the US dollar, and from the long process of the subordination of the sovereignty of individual European countries to the European Union, a CIA initiative implemented by Washington in order to control all of Europe by controlling only one unaccountable government.

With few exceptions, principally the UK, membership in the EU also meant loss of financial independence. As only the European Central Bank, an EU institution, can create euros, those countries so foolish as to accept the euro as their currency no longer have the power to create their own money in order to finance budget deficits.

The countries that joined the euro must rely on private banks to finance their deficits. The result of this is that over-indebted countries can no longer pay their debts by creating money or expect their debts to be written down to levels that they can service. Instead, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, and Ireland were looted by the private banks.

The EU forced the pseudo-governments of these countries to pay the northern European private banks by suppressing the living standards of their populations and by privatizing public assets at pennies on the dollar. Thus retirement pensions, public employment, education and health services have been cut and the money redirected to private banks. Municipal water companies have been privatized with the result being higher water bills. And so on.

As there is no reward, only punishment, for being a member of the EU, why did governments, despite the expressed wishes of their peoples, join?

The answer is that Washington would have it no other way. The European founders of the EU are mythical creatures. Washington used politicians that Washington controlled to create the EU.

In the 1970s my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, then a very high-ranking official in Washington with control over international security affairs, asked me to undertake a sensitive mission abroad. I refused. Nevertheless, he answered my question: “How does Washington get foreign countries to do what Washington wants?”

“Money,” he said. “We give their leaders bagfuls of money. They belong to us.”

The record is clear that the EU serves the interests of Washington, not the interests of Europe. For example, the French people and government are opposed to GMOs, but the EU permits a “precautionary market authorization” of GMO introduction, relying perhaps on the “scientific findings” of the scientists on Monsanto’s payroll. When the US state of Vermont passed a law requiring labeling of GMO foods, Monsanto sued the state of Vermont. Once the paid-off EU officials sign the TTIP agreement written by US global corporations, Monsanto will take over European agriculture.

But the danger to Europe goes far beyond the health of European peoples who will be forced to dine on poisonous foods. Washington is using the EU to force Europeans into conflict with Russia, a powerful nuclear power capable of destroying all of Europe and all of the United States in a few minutes.

This is happening because the paid-off with “bagfuls of money” European “leaders” had rather have Washington’s money in the short-run than for Europeans to live in the long-run.

It is not possible that any European politician is sufficiently moronic to believe that Russia invaded Ukraine, that Russia any moment will invade Poland and the Baltic states, or that Putin is a “new Hitler” scheming to reconstruct the Soviet Empire. These absurd allegations are nothing but Washington propaganda devoid entirely of truth. Washington’s propaganda is completely transparent. Not even an idiot could believe it.

Yet the EU goes along with the propaganda, as does NATO.

Why? The answer is Washington’s money. The EU and NATO are utterly corrupt. They are Washington’s well paid whores.

The only way Europeans can prevent a nuclear World War III and continue to live and to enjoy what remains of their culture that the Americans have not destroyed with America’s culture of sex and violence and greed, is for the European governments to follow the lead of the English and exit the CIA-created European Union. And exit NATO, the purpose of which evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which is now being used as an instrument of Washington’s World Hegemony.

Why do Europeans want to die for Washington’s world hegemony? That means Europeans are dying for Washington’s hegemony over Europe as well.

Why do Europeans want to support Washington when Washington’s high officials, such as Victoria Nuland, say “Fuck the EU.”

Europeans are already suffering from the economic sanctions that their overlord in Washington forced them to apply to Russia and Iran. Why do Europeans want to be destroyed by war with Russia? Do Europeans have a death wish? Have Europeans been Americanized and no longer appreciate the historic accumulation of artistic and architectural beauty, literature and music achievements of which their countries are custodians?

The answer is that it makes no difference whatsoever what Europeans think, because Washington has set up a government for them that is totally independent of their wishes. The EU government is accountable only to Washington’s money. A few people capable of issuing edicts are on Washington’s payroll. The entire peoples of Europe are Washington’s serfs.

Therefore, if Europeans remain the gullible, insouciant, and stupid peoples that they currently are, they are doomed, along with the rest of us.

On the other hand, if the European peoples can come to their senses, free themselves from The Matrix that Washington has imposed on them, and revolt against Washington’s agents who control them, the European peoples can save their own lives and the lives of the rest of us.

Even the most sincere democratic attempts landed, shortly after WWII, very far away from a satisfactory democracy. The old colonial empires with their unprosecuted and unpunished businessmen, bankers, bureaucrats, deceptive political elite and their intelligence services, followed their own post-war agenda for Europe.

An agenda that very fast proved to be plutocratic, neo-colonial and highly imperialistic, but with a new nation in the forefront instead of the former imperial powers Britain, France and Germany (old Prussia, Bavaria, Austria-Hungary and the Third Reich). All three helped their spiritual and cultural “child” USA , to deal with a few of the old colonies and to create a few new ones, with the backdrop of the Cold War and the Communist Threat as the main “boogieman”, and the American Dream as the main bait. The Muslim Threat against the newly established state of Israel, became a major pretext for the take-over of the Arab oil fields and the establishment of NATO and US military bases in the Middle East and Central Asia.

True to their old “habits”, and their evidently quite poor understanding of democracy, they turned the new democratic European nation-states into dependent satellite states of the old empires. And most of the old colonies in reality remained shackled and controlled through the toppling of democratically elected governments and the installment of puppet-governments that – threatened by economic hit men – signed unpayable “loan-agreements”, odious colonial treaties and genocidal, imperialistic socioeconomic models for their peoples.

What passes as Democracy in the world today is therefore just a highly watered down, a battered, version of a parliamentary, representative, bureaucratic voting system, with an attached “deaf” legal system, controlled and ruled by political and plutocratic, oligarchies. Such regimes, really has not much to do with the fundamental principles and practices of real democracy, where all attempts for despotism and injustice must be condemned in practice and where the citizens massive protests against such things, must be clearly expressed by the media and heard by the elected.

The post-war European citizens actually demanded that their Supreme Courts should do their job and react very hard and accurately, when the fundamental, democratic principles and the human rights were in great danger again. But the governments didn’t, the media didn’t, the oppositions didn’t, the courts didn’t. At least not until the late 60’s and the massive protest movements for civil and human rights and against the Vietnam war became international. After a short and finally quite lame democratization process in the European societies, because of the financial elites rabid resistance, they quickly succumbed to the intelligence services mass psycho-social manipulation tactics and manufacturing of public opinion and consent strategies. All in the service of the new colonial and geostrategic interests and aims of the western elite.

In spite of all this though, something very important had in fact been achieved by the peoples of Europe through their immense struggles and sacrifices, especially during the first half of the 20th century. At least the adequate constitutions, the legal and political agreements and the international laws and treaties were produced, agreed upon and signed, with the establishment of the democratic nation-state and the international peace treaties after WWII. But the governments and the legal systems didn’t create and they didn’t provide the accurate mechanisms and practices, in order to actually protect these laws, constitutions, agreements and treaties.

It stands clear today that those nations who put themselves in the forefront of western democracy, actually became those that most notoriously have broken these treaties, agreements and international laws ever since. And with the pretext to implement democracy. It was our bankers, our governments and our intelligence services with attached private corporations that deliberately undermined democracy and international justice after the war.

After seven decades with this crippled quasi-democratic rule and with a NATO and UN as this class determined democracy’s presumed guardians, most Europeans have become politically, ethically and socioeconomically illiterate. Common people have lost interest in taking part in the public affairs because of this widespread quasi-democracy, in which a small self-proclaimed financial elite have convinced them that we need professional politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats in charge.

The western governments in US and EU have ignored the massive protests allover the world, particularly in Europe, over the last seven years. These massive rallies are actually the echoes of the voices that has been raised since this imperialist version of democracy presented itself immediately after WWII.

Now, it is time for the Europeans and the Americans to, through sincere and truthful self-evaluation, restore, strengthen and vitalize democracy, not further weaken and maim it. And it’s not one minute too early for International Justice to finally “grow a spine”, and start to actually defend and protect the human and civil rights and the democratic nation-states constitutions and rights adequately, and as its first and foremost priority.

The governments and the legal systems must take the peoples massive protests and arguments seriously. Because it is their main responsibility. That, has to become the rule and not the exception, and only we, the citizens of the democratic nation-states can make that happen by increasing our democratic struggles and not fall into more propagandist, sociopolitical traps or various distraction and division tactics.

To establish real Justice and true Democracy is the ultimate anti-terrorist action and its the only way to prevent a world war.

If you ask Greeks they’ll say their lenders – including the IMF – have put them through hell over the past few years. And they’ll say it was mostly unnecessary. TRT World’s business programme looks at a recent report criticising the IMF for its Greece bailout. Matthew Moore presents ‘Money Talks’ from TRT World’s studios in Istanbul. From Wall Street to Main Street ‘Money Talks’ helps the 99% navigate their changing financial world.

It was a bloody July in Europe this year and again everyone are appalled by the evil acts of the few, that affect so many. But why on earth aren’t everyone appalled by the role US, EU and our governments, our bankers, our businessmen and our media plays in this horrific development?

To grasp the root causes that elicits the evil acts of the few, whether these few are lonely maniacs or organized terrorists, one must go beyond the disturbingly monotonous and self-justifying government tale. Pure evil doesn’t have a specific religion, a specific nationality or a specific culture. It has a specific “recipe” though, and dehumanization and deception are its basic ingredients.

Pure evil, only pours out from the hearts of individuals and societies that have let fear, narcissism, greed and empathy eroding doctrines form their character. And it pours out from the pain and the rage of the individuals and the societies that are continuously violated, oppressed, dehumanized and tormented.

Pure evil, is like a sooty, black, thin and gluey veil, a tar like concentrate, created from all human pain and suffering caused by intentional cruelty and injustice. It hovers over the earth looking for “fertile” and “welcoming” places to envelope and infest. It seek numbed, emotionally paralyzed and loveless human souls to lure into misanthropy, ruthlessness and death.

It finds such places wherever injustice and tyranny prevail, wherever people’s pain and suffering is ignored and wherever this very arrogance and indifference, becomes foreign policies and economic models. It finds such places where despotic, sociopath rulers have caused immense suffering and mass death. It finds such places where neglect, carelessness, abuse, ruthlessness and brutality towards the poor, the weak and the minorities has become the norm. And where the voices of the suffering are disregarded and suffocated, by those who were elected and assigned to defend them.

In the name of righteousness, our evil must therefore be deeply scrutinized, thoroughly investigated, politically condemned and promptly brought to justice in the international courts and tribunals. At least by the governments and the societies that claim to be democratic, righteous and humane.

Unfortunately, from what has been said and reported about the attacks in Nice and in Germany until this moment, apart from the regular criminal-reality-narrative, we have again basically just been told how free and democratic our societies are, compared to the societies the villains want. Even though, none of these particular attacks seem to be executed by IS or other organized jihadists, nobody want to truthfully explain to the European citizens that a lot of Arabs, Africans and Asians, in fact might have a very good reason to hate the neo-colonial and imperialistic policies and socioeconomic-cultural crusades of our sanctimonious democratic governments. We are again being told that “now more than ever before, we must defend our values in our free and open societies”, at the same time as France and EU are passing laws that further limit and cripple the human rights and democracy in Europe.

They tell us, “it is just temporary”, but we know through historic facts that it never is. Never ever have such limitations of democratic rights, been restored by the governing systems that enforced them and the socioeconomic models that demanded them. We know that such rights have only been won back, with bloody revolutions and devastating civil wars and world wars in the end. Over one hundred million people died in Europe last century in such conflicts, so we really do have every right in the world, to openly question the quality, the accuracy, the efficiency and the honesty of our democracy and our justice.

Of course nothing about that, was on the agenda of the NATO Summit in Warsaw 7, 8, 9 July. And not only member states was invited. For the first time was so many “hangaround-countries” invited plus countries that has supported and participated different initiatives of NATO.

Humanity fought against exactly that plutocratic and very aggressive, political and military and paramilitary behaviour last century and it sought to get rid of exactly such imperialistic ruthlessness, and it installed democracy and justice. The main reasons and the most decisive arguments behind the establishment of the democratic nation-states after the two world wars, was to provide a whole people, a nation, the intellectual, political and legal tools and make it possible for it to guarantee and ensure democracy and the human rights for ALL its citizens. That is, to protect and defend the citizen against tyrants, plutocracies and oligarchies.

They were born as an absolute necessity, from the ashes and the remnants of the old ruthless, kingdoms and empires that had starved, tortured, massacred and driven away entire folk groups and peoples from their lands in Europe for 1000 years. And they matured, in particular during WWII, when the peoples from a few of these new European nation-states fought fascism and nazism and by that strengthened their democratic character.

However, what we can conclude from historic records, is that these popular democratic strives and struggles have always been accompanied with immense suffering, rivers of blood and millions of dead, caused by the sinister conspiracies, the sabotages, the dictatorships and the wars of the bankers and the businessmen with their political-legal “gangs”. Our sanctimonious and self-righteous, democratic governments and courts.

Systematic financial and economic terrorism most certainly exists and it triggers physical terrorism, and we can no longer pretend that it’s not like that, or that US, EU and our governments don’t commit horrific crimes against entire populations, nations and continents. Not, if we want to call ourselves civilized and not if we want to handle global terrorism adequately.

“I totally agree with the Schiller Institute’s viewpoint that we need a renaissance of Classical culture, as we see measures being taken to prevent it from happening. Not only is the educational system in Greece doing everything possible to make Classical culture disappear,— it seems to be following steps taken in the United States and in other EU countries. It seems that Classical culture, which also encompasses humanism, philosophy, the sciences and art, creates fear among the ruling classes who do not want to see the people thinking again. We should resist any such tendencies.”

Leonidas Chrysantopoulos (EPAM)

Creating A Common Future For Mankind And A Renaissance Of Classical Culture

June 28, 2016 — The Schiller Institute’s international two-day conference gathered more than 300 guests from 24 nations and four continents for an intense and profound dialogue on how to stop the immediate danger of world war, by creating instead a new paradigm of global cooperation and development, based on a dialogue of civilizations and the unique creativity of mankind. Conference participants were extremely alerted about the escalation of western geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China and the danger of thermonuclear war and passed a resolution calling for an immediate end of sanctions against Russia and Syria. To end the war and to reconstruct war-torn Syria and the greater region of Southwest-Asia, was a key focus of the conference, during which Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Presidency of Syria, addressed the conference audience and engaged in a moving Q&A via live stream.

Global Crisis: Proposals for Solution
Leonidas Chrysantopoulos EPAM, Greece – former Greek Ambassador to Poland, Canada and Armenia, former Secretary General of the Black Sea

Transcript:

“Allow me at the outset to congratulate the Schiller Institute and its Director, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, for trying to make the world better for humanity. I wish us all success in this important conference and hope that the outcome will be beneficial for us all.

The theme of our conference is very appropriate and comes at a moment when humanity is not only facing its worst economic crisis since the depression of 1928, but also the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, due to the aggressive policies of the United States in the last decade, that have destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The EU is continuing to gradually collapse, as it destroys its member states, forcing some to consider leaving, while its democratic deficit is increasing and far-right parties are closing in on power.

The world economy cannot get out of a vicious circle that it has been in since the outset of the crisis in 2008. We are witnessing global demonstrations against austerity measures that enhance poverty instead of growth, and against greedy financial systems that lead to extreme social inequality. The demonstrations in France are a good example. Until now, nobody has been listening to the people. It is due time that decisions be taken on priorities beneficial to the interests of human beings. We should no longer ask the question of what the markets are saying, but what our people are saying.

The EU not only has become an incompetent organization, but is also in disarray as more and more is being heard every day about political parties with rightwing programs, and exiting the EU. The UK referendum of Thursday demonstrates the case.

In Greece the situation is deteriorating. After the legislation adopted by Parliament on May 22, Greece has ceased to exist as a state, having given the economic management of the country to the lenders and to the EU for the next 100 years. It is the first time in history that a country has dissolved itself. Parliament will no longer have any role to play in this area. In May 2010, the Greek government was forced to sign the Loan Agreement so that it could, through austerity measures, reduce the public debt which in 2009 was 129% of GNP or 299 billion euro in absolute numbers. After three memoranda and the mistaken policies of the EU, the IMF, and the Greek governments, not only was the public debt not reduced, but it has increased to 180% of GNP.

The Syriza government was elected on an anti-austerity program, yet betrayed the Greek people by doing exactly the opposite. It did not even take into account a referendum in which 62% of the people voted against the austerity measures. In spite of the fact that they had acknowledged their mistakes, the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF continue to insist on the implementation of the same ineffective policies that are destroying a member-state of the EU and its people. Unemployment is up to 25% from 9% in 2010, Greeks looking into garbage bins for food is a common sight, overtaxation has paralyzed the economy, and the health system has collapsed, while more than 5,000 people have committed suicide.

But it is not only that the measures are erroneous, they have also violated the Lisbon Treaty as well as the human rights of the Greek people, something that is also mentioned in the report dated February 29 of the UN independent expert, Juan Pablo Bohoslavski, to the UN Human Rights Council:

The US-provoked war in Syria with the participation of some EU states, has created the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Almost 5 million refugees have left Syria to ask asylum mainly in the EU. Germany has 484,000, Sweden 108.000 and more in other Member States. Turkey is currently hosting 2,748,000, Lebanon 1,500,000 and Jordan 1,265,000.The EU, once the champion of humanitarian assistance, was incapable of managing the refugee flow. Greece, a country that had no participation in the Syrian war, was inundated with an increased number of refugees while many of its Central European members refused to accept them. Though the movements into Greece were gradually reduced after the shaky EU-Turkey Agreement of March the EU has still to live up to its previous decisions, according to which 60,000 refugees from Greece and Italy would be resettled in EU member-states. Today, Greece has 56,000 refugees, all of whom want to depart North. It is, however a shame that the US has accepted only 4,000 refugees.

Another threat facing humanity is the U.S. animosity towards Russia, as if we were still in the cold war period. A missile system is being set up to encircle Russia and, of course, Moscow is preparing a defense shield to counter it. The EU embargo on Russia after the Ukrainian crisis is not at all helping the situation. Also, threats have been recently made by Obama against China with references to the need to restrict her economic power.

With a collapsing EU and a United States looking for confrontation with Russia and China, a solution for humanity can be the BRICS’ initiative. This is an initiative of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to pursue a policy of economic development for the benefit of humanity. They created their own Development Bank to invest in necessary development projects. China has also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, joined by over 20 Asian nations as founding members, and has set up a Silk Road Development Fund. Within the BRICS, China has proposed the creation of a Free Trade Area of Asia and the Pacific. The Chinese proposal was quickly rejected by Obama, who created his own free trade organization. The incorporation of the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement to the BRICS could create a formidable power, which—if remaining out of the control of the bankers—could be decisive so that humanity reaches global peace and ends poverty through economic development.

From what was previously mentioned, we can see that there is a crisis of civilization that is impeding humanity’s progress. I totally agree with the Schiller Institute’s viewpoint that we need a renaissance of Classical culture, as we see measures being taken to prevent it from happening. Not only is the educational system in Greece doing everything possible to make Classical culture disappear,— it seems to be following steps taken in the United States and in other EU countries. It seems that Classical culture, which also encompasses humanism, philosophy, the sciences, and art, creates fear among the ruling classes who do not want to see the people thinking again. We should resist any such tendencies.

As for the dialogue of cultures,— yes by all means this should take place, and perhaps we could get on board the UN dialogue of civilizations and make it even better. Both dialogues are useful efforts to enhance efforts for a permanent global peace.

In conclusion, and after having criticized the EU and the United States, allow me to propose some solutions that would be beneficial for humanity.

Greece

For Greece it is imperative to denounce the Loan Facility Agreement of May 2010, on the basis of Articles 8-52 of the Vienna Convention concerning the Law of Treaties. These articles anticipate the invalidity of a treaty, if there was error, fraud, or coercion of a representative of a state. The cessation of payments with the denunciation of the Loan Agreement and the nationalization of the Bank of Greece, will allow Greece to repair the damage done and instigate true development. Adoption of a national currency will follow. The Unified Popular Front (EPAM), a political party not in parliament yet, supports such a policy.

The EU

There must be a transformation of the EU into an efficient organization, having as its sole priority the safeguarding of the interests of its people. A new charter is necessary, drafted by movements of citizens of member-states who will submit their proposals to a European Assembly composed of representatives of these movements. The existing EU must be dissolved.

The United States

It must stop its policy of destroying nations, and Obama must return to the Nobel Committee the Peace Prize that was awarded to him, since he did nothing to deserve it. The same applies to the EU, which also received the Peace Prize. The United States must adopt a more friendly policy towards Russia and the rest of the world, for the benefit of humanity.

Humanity

The deletion of the global debt, which is about $600 trillion, will allow humanity to restart on a new and healthy basis. In history, we have examples of debt deletion, from the ancient Greek Sisahthia to the Jubilee of ancient Hebrew communities, where every 50 years all debts were cancelled. Even during the 1970s, the developed countries of the West deleted the debt of the Non-Aligned Movement, thus allowing the economic boom of Yugoslavia. The BRICS’ movement can promote this while the decision must be taken by the G-8. Humanity as a whole will benefit, because it will be able to restart on sound and healthy principles.

In order to implement the previously mentioned proposals, it is necessary to have politicians with imagination, vision, and courage — politicians who care about the progress of humanity and who can control the greed of multinational companies by restricting their power. Such politicians do not exist today. So we have to create them.”

Speech bubble translation/traducíones de los textos:
– 13:31 :
En: Eric TOUSSAINT, scientific coordinator of Greece Truth Committee on Public Debt (quoting Keynes): “If you owe your bank a thousand euros, you have a problem. But if you owe a billion, it has.”

– 14:11 :
En: Donald Tusk, President of the European Council: “Given what is happening in Greece, has appeared the illusion that it would now be possible to change the course of Europe. That we could build an alternative to the traditional view of Europe, to the discourse on austerity.”

– 14:19 :
En: Romaric Godin, journalist with ‘La Tribune’ newspaper: “Euro is the ECB currency which distributes it on critereas that take account of financial issues -poorly hiding politic purposes- rather than the peoples well-being.”

In order to understand Brexit in its full historical context, we must know about the origins and motivations for the formation of the European Union and the forces that have shaped the EU bureaucracy into an arm of the IMF/World Bank-led Wall Street hegemon. Today Professor Michel Chossudovsky joins us to expose the EU as the imperial project that it always was, and the growing movement against EU domination as an anti-imperial movement of world historical importance.

As we predicted last year, the deep state coup against Erdogan finally materialized last weekend…but it fizzled out almost as quickly as it arrived. So what are we to make of this would-be putsch? Did Erdogan allow it to happen in order to further cement his control on the rebound? Or was this merely a trial run for the real CIA/NATO/Gulenist coup yet to come? And what role do the Turkish people play in all of this? Joining us today to dissect the mayhem is Sibel Edmonds and Spiro Skouras of Newsbud.com.

The Trans-Atlantic community is now faced with a choice which, if answered incorrectly, may condemn humanity to an early extinction

This choice lies between two paradigms: 1) Continuing down the path of militarism and monetarism that have become characteristic governing principles of the system dominating those economies of Europe and North America; or 2) accept the offers made by countries affiliated with the Russia-China-India alliance which has established an alternative security and economic framework for “win-win cooperation” based on a revival of the 2000 year old Silk Road. This new paradigm has many facets and integrating parts, but is unified around the principle of developmental, long-term visionary projects tied within the “One Belt-One Road” and its global extensions, known increasingly as the “World Landbridge,” across every continent on the face of the earth.

The Fog of War settles on a Myopic Europe

On May 11th, Romanian officials were joined by the chiefs of NATO and the US military establishment to inaugurate the new Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense installation which has been in the works for many years and which Russian military officials have openly warned is recognized as an existential threat to Russia’s survival. This system is part of a broad array of aggressive Anglo-American maneuvers aimed at winning a “limited” thermonuclear war with Russia and its Chinese ally.

Within this array of military programs, the USA has not only quadrupled its Eastern European military systems from $750 million to $3.5 billion, and has put a $1 Trillion nuclear weapons modernization plan in action, which includes stationing new B61-12 bombers and tactical nuclear weapons in Germany. It has also led the permanent establishment of 4000 rotating troops comprising Ukrainian, Lithuanian and other soldiers stationed in Lithuania, a program recognized by many military analysts as a new Operation Barbarossa. Already $100 billion over ten years has been spent by the United States on this military infrastructure encircling both Russia and China.

NATO officials on the scene were quick to dismiss Russia’s concerns that its strategic nuclear response capabilities were being threatened, as American Deputy Defense Secretary, Bob Work stated: “This site, nor the site in Poland, has any capability- none whatsoever- to undermine Russia’s strategic deterrent.” While that may be true in the present, Russia’s ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko was quick to point out this line of reasoning as fraudulent when he retorted: “By deploying the MK-41 universal launchers, capable of launching medium-range missiles, at the Aegis Ashore facilities, the US is seriously undermining the treaty of Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces”[1] . This system must not be conceptualized outside of a top-down evaluation of America’s global military encirclement of Russia’s eastern border and that of its greatest ally, China, with the expansion of THAAD missile systems in South Korea and military buildup in Japan, Philippines and Australia advancing quickly under the military title of “Air-Sea Battle”.

The explicit danger of World War and the refutation of Bob Work’s claim of non-aggression were made additionally clear by NATO’s Commander General Sir Philip Breedlove on April 1st, 2016 in Latvia, when commenting on the 4000 troop permanently deployed in Eastern Europe, Breedlove stated:

We are prepared to fight and win if we have to… our focus will expand from assurance to deterrence, including measures that vastly improve our readiness… to the east and north we face a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and as we have continued to witness these last two years, Russia continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.

Sir Breedlove was most recently joined by NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Commander Sir Richard Sherrif who also revealed the plan to go to war with Russia during a speech promoting his new book 2017: War With Russia. Sir Sherrif exclaimed on May 18 that a nuclear war with Russia is likely within the coming year.

Other Russian military analysts have been even more candid than Ambassador Grushko in the Russian assessment of the motive behind the NATO war plan. One such analyst is Putin-advisor, and co-architect of the Eurasian Economic Union[2] Sergei Glaziev, who in an interview with Lenta.ru (republished in English on Russia Insider), has pinpointed correctly that the information war, economic war, and NATO missile shield buildup are the direct consequences of a collapsing bubble economy.

The economic entities that dominate in the US, serving a financial oligarchy, have destabilized the American monetary and financial system, which defaults about twice a year. The causes of the global financial crisis of 2008 have not disappeared and the American debt bubble — financial pyramids composed of derivatives and the national debt —are still growing… This is what American geopoliticians study in the State Department and the White House, continuing to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century, and now the US is unleashing another world war.

Glaziev goes on to call for a new paradigm of cooperation via large-scale economic development modeled on what China has done with the New Silk Road, and the newly emerging Eurasian the Economic Union and Trans-Eurasian Economic Belt[3].

China’s New Silk Road Miracle

In recent years, China has demonstrated a creative talent for economic performance as it has not only lifted 600 million people (over half of its population) out of poverty, but has made the New Silk Road a global, open concept which has provided a viable rescue plan for NATO countries locked in the crossfire of nuclear war who see no long-term hope for a future within a collapsing Eurozone. Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries are currently signing multi-billion dollar deals for infrastructure, high-tech and energy programs which are pulling their nations’ leadership out of the closed system cage of Troika/Wall Street/NATO dictatorship and into a new alignment with the new paradigm of win-win cooperation. China has already built 18,000 km of high-speed rail and has extended its program to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran and other middle eastern countries that have been targeted for regime change by Western Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal ideologues.

China’s $46 billion infrastructure plan already includes a project to double Pakistan’s energy supply, construct new ports across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and extend nearly a trillion dollars of investment into long-term development of countries along the beltway (representing over 4.4 billion people).

The Case for Canada

The same choice which NATO colonies in Europe are faced with is also confronting the leadership of Canada: Join the New Silk Road, or get dragged ever deeper into an un-winnable war and the economic disintegration of an imperial casino economy.

On April 16th, 2016 Canada’s Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the NORAD-NATO Ballistic Missile Shield program, rejected in 2005 under the former Liberal government of Paul Martin, will be revived under the 2017 Defense Policy Review. A summary reading of the official 30 page public consultation document reveals clearly that Canada’s defense establishment not only continues to adhere to the Neo-Con narrative of Russia’s “aggressive, belligerent behavior in Ukraine and the Arctic”, but that in the face of such “threats”, Canada must integrate ever closer with NORAD and revive the dossier on Arctic Ballistic Missile Defense. The document reads:

One issue that has not been considered by Canada for over a decade concerns ballistic missile defense. Given the increase in the number of countries with access to ballistic missile technology and their potential to reach North America, this threat is expected to endure and grow more sophisticated in coming decades.” The document ends with the question: “In accordance with its 2005 decision, Canada does not participate in the US ballistic missile defense system for the defense of North America. Should this decision be revisited given the changing technologies and threats?

Canada’s former Defense Minister Bill Graham, who formerly resisted the Dick Cheney-led BMD program in 2005, has now become one of many converts to the program and has been appointed by the Cabinet of Justin Trudeau to the panel of four experts overseeing the of Defense policy review.

China’s Steps In… again

In the face of such a self-destructive agenda, the same brilliant remedy has been offered to Canada as has been presented to countries of Europe by the government of China- namely, the offer to join the New Silk Road!

On May 10th, Chinese Ambassador to Canada Luo Zhaohui, speaking on behalf of the Chinese government, wrote a powerful op-ed for the Asia Pacific Foundation called “The Belt and Road Initiative: A Blueprint for “Win-Win” Cooperation in the New Era”. In his editorial, Ambassador Zhaohui called directly for Canada to join this new paradigm:

The Belt and Road initiative is a new type of cooperation mechanism. China will follow the principles of openness, cooperation, harmony, inclusiveness, mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. The development programs under the initiative framework are not exclusive but are open to all interested countries or parties, be it from regions along the route or other parts of the world… Some Canadian friends said to me that as Canada and China are Pacific neighbors, the Belt, and Road initiative means a lot of opportunities for Canada as well. In view of the progress that has been made in China-Canada cooperation in all fields over the years, Canada can build on its advantages in resources and technology to strengthen cooperation with Asian countries in such areas as infrastructure development, industrial investment, energy resources, financing, people-to-people exchanges and advanced manufacturing…In the meantime, China and Canada could jointly explore ways and means to extend the Belt and Road to North America[bold added by author].

Canada’s involvement in the New Silk Road is shaped by our strategic location on the Maritime Silk Road on the Pacific side of the continent with British Columbia playing a key energy role with the Pacific Gateway Strategy and on the Northern land-based component known as the “Arctic New Silk Road.” Canada plays a critical role in the Arctic Silk Road, which involves the completion of a century-long program for the continental American-Eurasian integration called the Bering Strait rail tunnel. This is a program which was advocated by the Schiller Institute since the early 1980s and has been officially revived by China since 2014.

China is not alone in this perspective. Last year, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom Dr. Yakovenko sent a clear message to Canada and other Arctic powers, calling on Arctic nations to abandon militarization, in favor of collaboration on economic benefits and diplomacy (Full article here). Ambassador Yakovenko wrote:

Some Western leaders have called on NATO to expand the area of responsibility in the Arctic direction, something that contradicts the current trend of keeping the Arctic free of military competition… and unfortunately is used as a tool of propaganda against Russia… We hope that the significant achievements of the Arctic Council will remain the basis for global cooperation on the development of the Arctic region as a unique natural zone in a peaceful, non-politicized fashion and the benefit of all mankind.

The options for nations in the Trans Atlantic zone are clear: Join the new era of common prosperity, long-term development, and win-win cooperation or face the consequences of a new fascism and thermonuclear war which will leave the world smoldering for centuries to come.

[1] Referring to the 1988 US-Russia pledge not to produce, test or deploy ground based missiles near each other’s borders

[2] The Eurasian Economic Union is composed of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. Ukraine could have become a member of this union had the Soros-State Department orchestrated neo Nazi-Putch known as the Maidan not been unleashed, toppling the pro-Russian government of Yanukovitch in 2014.

[3] The New Silk Road was officially integrated into the Eurasian Economic Union as of May 8, 2015. A March 25, 2015, report on the Business Insider on the Trans Eurasian Economic Belt featured Russian Railways President Vladimir Yakunin describing the project in the following terms: “This is an inter-state, inter-civilisation, project. It should be an alternative to the current (neo-liberal) model, which has caused a systemic crisis. The project should be turned into a world ‘future zone’, and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies.”

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The panic on the outcome of the referendum in favor of Brexit continues. And what didn’t we hear over the last days? The stupidity is so absolute that it transcends all previous.

We hear that “those who voted for Brexit are nationalists and right-wing”. The truth is that the majority of the British and especially the working classes – starting with the traditional working class in the old British industrial centers, today swept by mass poverty and unemployment – voted in favor of maintaining the nation state and against the supranational imperialist EU construct.

This was the main argument of the campaign in favor of Brexit. Whodo you wantto have the control? You, the British citizen, or the inaccessible EU bureaucracy that is not accountable to anyone? The majority of Britons answered especially at this question – as mentioned – the most fatigued layers of the people, replied with the overwhelming rates of over 60% that the control should be in their hands.

The vote therefore in favor of Brexit was primarily a class vote, as it derived mainly from the British working classes and at the same time it was national because their expectation for a radical change was concentrated on a national independence claim. And therefore whatever the mourners of the European Reich say, the vote in favor of Brexit was deeply democratic.

The working classes understood from pure class intuition that the main issue is who makes the decisions. And the nation state was created – first and foremost by its own working classes – just to ensure the active participation of every citizen of the nation in the creation of the state.

That is why the nation state became the cradle of the revival of the struggle for democracy, but also a special area of the class struggle. That is the struggle of the working classes for social and political conquests. Conquests acquired only and exclusively within the framework of the nation state.

Instead, the EU initially was based on a system of governance far away from the nations and peoples. Instead of a system of governance depending on the will of the many, the nation and the people, a system of governance by an enlightened elite of bureaucrats was created. The LOT (you and me) is simply too indifferent, too emotional, too uneducated to be allowed to safely elect the governments and the policies to be appliedin their homeland.

Democracy, where the people decide what should happen in their homeland, is an insecure system for the markets and the power and should therefore be replaced with a supranational power system. This is the central idea behind the whole EU edifice. That is why the EU officials are not accountable to anyone, and is protected with enhanced immunity against anyjudicialsystem.

TheEU Parliament is nothing more than the alibi of the absolutismof Brussels. This is a revival of the medieval parliaments,which the monarch convened in order to get the approval of his subjects on policy choices. And unsurprisingly, who was there as a representative of the kingdom’spopulationriskedhis head, going against the monarch, or gained privileges and riches if proved to be a loyal subject.

Such parliamentswere never a product or asampleof democracy, this is today the fact also with the EP. An advisory parliament ofacquisitionwithprivileges and riches to the representativesfrom the peoples ofthe empire.

Of course the result of the referendum in Britain was only the beginning. Already the battle of the very meaning and essence of democracy has broken out. Not just for the sovereignty of many, and the compliance of power to claim the vast majority of major radical changes in favor ofworkersin Britain. The defense of the nation state with the Brexit was just the beginning.

In a little-reported statement given on March 1st at the influential London School of Economics in the UK, Lord Mervyn King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, confirmed that the financial crisis afflicting Europe since 2009 is essentially the result of a “deliberate” act of policy. Highly critical of the destructive economic strategies of the Brussels EU, he predicted that, in order to free its weakest member countries from the strangulating combination of austerity measures and high unemployment they are suffering from, the euro currency zone will have to be dismantled.

Citing the example of Greece, where the unemployment rate is currently almost 25 percent, Lord King described what has happened over the past 7 years as an “appalling” example of Brussels EU economic policy failure. He added that, for the poorest eurozone countries, the long-term benefits of ditching the euro and returning to their national currencies outweigh the short-term costs.

Head of Brussels EU Commission predicted European financial crisis back in 2001

But Mervyn King is hardly the first high-level official to confirm that Europe’s economic malaise has been inflicted on its citizens deliberately.

In a barely-noticed article in the Financial Times back in 2001, the then president of the Brussels EU Commission, Romano Prodi, stated that he was sure “the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments.”

“It is politically impossible to propose that now”, he went on. “But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created.”

Since its introduction to world financial markets in 1999, observers have repeatedly pointed out that the euro was flawed. Significantly, even Jacques Delors, its architect, eventually admitted that the currency was doomed from the start, declaring that European leaders chose to turn a blind eye to the fundamental weaknesses and imbalances of member states’ economies. Viewed in the historical light of Romano Prodi’s 2001 statement, of course, it is now clear why they did this. In short, the financial crisis in Europe has been created deliberately to enable the Brussels EU elite to use it as the rationale for bringing in new laws that move the construct closer to the political dictatorship that was intended all along.

The Brussels EU is incapable of reform

Across Europe, senior officials are increasingly coming to the inescapable conclusion that the Brussels EU is not capable of reform. The latest prominent example of this came following the recent resignation of John Longworth from his post as director-general of the powerful British Chambers of Commerce business group. After taking the decision to resign from his position to enable him to speak out freely over the issue of Britain’s upcoming referendum on its Brussels EU membership, Longworth openly described the construct as “incapable of meaningful reform”. Accusing British Prime Minister David Cameron of trying to scaremonger the British people into voting to remain in the bloc, he predicted that Britain could have a bright economic future after leaving it.

Due to its fundamentally undemocratic structure – with the EU Commission holding all executive power and the EU Parliament serving merely as a fig leaf – the Brussels EU needs to be publicly rejected by its citizens, dismantled, and eventually replaced by a truly democratic system of representation: A Europe for the People, by the People. Until such time as this happens, however, the 500 million people of Europe will continue to remain subject to economic dictatorship, widespread unemployment, and a political model in which democracy increasingly becomes a thing of the past.

If humanitarianism was truly the motivation, though, countless experts have pointed out that it would be radically more cost effective to help refugees and victims of globalist wars closer to their homes.

Soros’ operations are so intricately woven into the fabric of so many national governments, international organizations, NGOs, political parties, universities, media outlets, and labor and social movements; it takes a full-time effort to track these entities and their activities. Soros operatives have even penetrated Wikipedia in its English and various other language formats to spread disinformation and one-sided propaganda.

Soros has managed to infiltrate some leftist political parties around the world and particularly those in Europe that have questioned the framework and future of the European Union. Soros master plan is to oversee the complete destruction of the nation-states of southeastern Europe that now permit practically unfettered access of civil war and economic migrants from Syria, Iraq, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of his programs to re-engineer nations the seven independent republics that once constituted Yugoslavia, now serve as major transit routes for perhaps tens of thousands and an impending hundreds of thousands of non-European migrants.

In FYROM, Soros’ organizations work under the pretense of left cover. In other words, Soros’ NGOs fund and operate organizations and movements that are seen as Left in nature but are, in reality, revolutionary organizations designed to push a political agenda, change Macedonian culture, install a leftist puppet regime. The Soros network is established and functional. The new Macedonian journalists and so-called intellectuals have been grown like mushrooms in a basement. They were advancing both professionally and financially. The latter ones were receiving fees for the alleged scientific papers which were neither published nor evaluated anywhere. In May 2015, protests began erupting in Skopje, against the Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his government. The protests, led by Zoran Zaev, were allegedly in response to the massive spying and surveillance of FYROM officials and other individuals as well as an alleged cover-up of a killing of a young man by police in 2011. The unrest which took place across the country over the last year was perhaps due to the willingness of the FYROM government to work with Russia to build the Balkan Stream pipeline through the country. Now FYROM with the refugee crisis looming has stopped all but a trickle of Iraqi and Syrian refugees from crossing, following similar restrictions by countries further north on the route to Western Europe. A move that perhaps has put Soros plan on hold.

Soros’ hand is present also in Greece through various non-governmental projects. As noted via GIA many times, former Finance Minister Yiannis Varoufakis appeared to be a so-called “Soros-ides” (Soros men) and, of course, the governing party Syriza which is pro-minority rights (all sorts of rights) advocate party. A Soros-funded project is the Helsinki Observatory whose Greek branch has ruled many times that Greece is violating minorities’ rights (mainly those of Muslims in Thrace and the so-called Tsamides in the border with Albania Southern Iperus). Moreover, under the Helsiki Observatory umbrella is the Center for Reconciliation in Southeastern Europe, Greek Team for Minorities Rights and Center for Research of Minorities Rights. Indeed, Soros has been funding and opening his infamous “Solidarity Centres” in Greece since January 2014 using philanthropy and economic relief as justification for the opening of the centers. Since the refugee crisis has exploded it has been discovered that refugees arriving in Greece on smugglers’ boats are given a ‘migrants handbook’ funded by an NGO belonging to the Open Society Network of the US Billionaire George Soros. Sky News discovered a copy of the travel guide packed with tips, maps, phone numbers and advice on getting across Europe on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos. Among those behind the booklet are organizations called WatchTheMed-Alarm phone and w2eu, which means ‘Welcome To Europe.’ “W2EU” is an NGO belonging to the Open-Society network of US Billionaire George Soros. W2EU seems to be engaged in systematically probing European borders for entry points for migrants, according to their website. Moreover, Soros has been funding NGO Arsis, Praksis and the Greek Council for Refugees in Greece. The municipality of Thessaloniki has submitted an application for membership in Solidarity Now donations program (it is the network that is attached to the Soros Open Society Foundation) since early summer 2015. These Soros funded NGO’s rented about 80 beds in the city’s central hotels to accommodate refugees, especially pregnant women and families with young children.

Nevertheless, throughout cities and towns in Europe and of course Greece, newly-arrived migrants sleeping in parks and on sidewalks have created a public health nightmare with human feces covering park grounds and the stench of urine permeating the walls of buildings and gutters. With the refugee situation quickly spiraling out of control across parts of the continent — the mass sexual assaults on New Year across Germany and beyond, the implosion of law and order around Calais in France, the widely reported overrunning of Stockholm’s central station by refugee youths, and more — the public is now growing increasingly outraged. Given the above, the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has lashed out at billionaire George Soros, criticizing the support he has expressed towards refugees from the Middle East heading to Europe, saying that he undermines stability on the continent. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that George Soros, was responsible for the ongoing refugee crisis. Soros belongs to a group of “activists” that encourages migrants to head to Europe and thus intentionally aggravates the situation, Orban said.

What is the utter goal then?

Destroy Nationalism!

Just as seen with Soros themed revolutions in the Arab countries and Ukraine, migrants on the move have been instructed via Twitter where increased border controls have been established and how to bypass them. This «outside» direction has resulted in refugees heading from Greece to make their way to the Austrian and German frontiers, thus avoiding increasingly hostile Hungary and Serbia and FYROM recently. There has already been a practical border skirmish between Croatian police escorting a train full of refugees to the Hungarian border and Hungarian border guards. More recently Greek security guards clashed with FYROM frontier police.

Nevertheless, “the European Union”, Soros said in a recent interview, is “on the verge of collapse” due to the sudden influx of well over a million Islamic refugees last year. Not coincidentally, Soros also has ideas about “solutions.” And not surprisingly, those alleged “solutions” involve more globalism for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East — along with less sovereignty, self-government, and liberty. For Soros this might include the creation of new institutions, including agencies to usurp control over immigration from formerly sovereign nations, as well as to create military outfits ostensibly aimed at “protecting Europe’s borders” from the refugee tsunami sparked by globalist machinations. Without any doubt, it is also important to point out that the question of the creation of “micro-states” and “mini-states” on the Zbigniew Brzezinski model is, as always, readily present. This method is essentially both a strategy of tension and a goal of creating the world where previously united nations are reduced to petty impotent and squabbling pseudo-states incapable of standing up to any major government, corporation, or bank.

Likewise, a planet of peoples who are incapable of viewing anything other than the convenient scapegoat is given to them by the world oligarchy will be incapable of resisting the power and will of that oligarchy. In the absence of a fully formed “microstate,” the ability to use poorly drawn borders, ethnic conflicts, racial tension, and religious fundamentalism/antagonism provides this oligarchy with the ability to play national governments and their populations like a fiddle. According to the military doctrine of the American Army, the Balkans (the western part) and the Caucasian Black Sea region are territorially compact war zones which should not be overburdened by international borders. More or less it is similar to the current implementation of the Islamic State project: the elimination of the borders between the countries and establishment of one territorial unit. In order to achieve that, there was a need to ignore the existing borders and to break the traditional and state and political continuity.

If humanitarianism was truly the motivation, though, countless experts have pointed out that it would be radically more cost effective to help refugees and victims of globalist wars closer to their homes. Literally 25 to 50 times more people could be supported in Lebanon or Jordan than in Europe, for the same amount of tax fund. Resettling millions of non-Western refugees in the West, as is happening right now, would never have been possible without creating the initial problems. But it will have major implications stretching generations into the future.

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Germans Have Right to Oppose Migration, Greece Threatened by NATO Takeover. One of the most intelligent and interesting Greek politicians talks on different topics and today`s main geopolitical issues.

One year ago, while in Athens, Greece, I interviewed Mr. Dimitris Kazakis, leader of United Popular Front (EPAM), a popular Left movement that emerged from the anti-memorandum protests of 2011. Mr. Kazakis is an erudite speaker, a socialist economist, and one who knows both the terrain of the social struggle and the high-end banking sector in London where he worked for many years.

At the time, Mr. Kazakis was not very optimistic about Syriza – the Left party governing Greece, if to say the least. He warned that Prime Minister Tsipras has no intention of breaking with austerity and that he will take on a new contract that will enslave the country further. The interview was conducted in February 2015, but it took me months to publish it since I wanted to give Syriza a chance. Mr. Kazakis was right. It happened exactly as he said. One year later, on February 17, 2016, I met Mr. Kazakis at the offices of EPAM in Athens again. Things are much worse in Athens now.

Mr. Kazakis covered almost all issues under the sun. He talked about the migration crisis, why he supports a Brexit, Greece’s economic predicament, the world economy, NATO in the Aegean, Erdogan and Merkel, NGOs dubious roles, nationalism, why cosmopolitanism is dangerous, the Germans, perpetual war, Venezuela and Cuba. Below is the full interview.

You actually predicted what will happen at the time because at the time what you said was that these negotiations are a sham, they are going to sign on another contract and so on. At the time when I wanted to publish the article, many people were warning me not to publish it, not to bring down Syriza, and it turned out that it happened exactly as you said. So that’s why I published it later, but at least, I published it before basically what was a betrayal of a promise.

I can understand that because when I went to a conference in Nice, in November, they asked me to explain what happened to Greece, what happened to the Left party, or to the Left government of Syriza. And I told them what exactly happened from day one. Right after the elections of the 25th of January, back in 2015. Everyone was astonished. There were French, Spanish, Italians, Germans. Everybody. And of course, afterwards, everybody came to me and told me that we are very very sorry. We were totally wrong in our estimation about Syriza the Left government.

The problem is that by then it was too late…

Yeah, exactly. Too late for us, especially. And for Europe. Because the system invested in the Syriza government, to show everybody, every European person, that no one can do anything with the whole system, the system of the European regime, of the banks, of the Euro. And in that way, they were trying to disappoint the society. Especially Greece and, of course, all over Europe. No one could understand what happened here in Greece. How the anti-memorandum coalition of Syriza and Kammenos [the Independent Greeks –ANEL] can do such things as sign a third memorandum against the people and produce such a politically incorrect situation here in Greece.

This brings me to a related question which I think is relevant. In Britain, the UK, the place where you lived in the past and also worked, there will be a vote on Britain leaving the European Union. So, if I may ask, do you support Britain leaving the European Union?

Yeah, of course.

And does that mean you would also support UKIP and the Eurosceptical people?

As EPAM, we have relations with the umbrella of the movements against the European Union in Britain. And I was asked by British colleagues, fighters against the EU, to go there on a speech tour. I don’t know if I can do that because of the political situation here in Greece…

Schengen, because of the everyday situation?

Exactly. And now we have a social – we are in the process of a social resurrection of the Greek society, so we have a lot to do in Greece. I don’t know if we have the spare time to go over in Britain on a speech tour. But, anyway, we support any movement that is against the European Union in terms of democracy. We are fighting for democracy. And in order to fight for democracy you have to fight for national sovereignty. That’s the basis of democracy. You cannot have democracy without national sovereignty of any people. British people, Greek people, the German people. And that’s the only way. So, yes. We support the NO campaign against the European Union. And we have discussed with certain members of the UKIP.

Of course we are on a different page in terms of social and economic policy. But that’s our difference. But we support them for Britain to leave the European Union. And they have to leave. Because otherwise they will face one way or the other the same sort of situation that we are facing.

How so? If you can elaborate on that a little bit….

You cannot have a European Union, you cannot participate in a union and have mainly the banks, patrons, and of course the banking elite, or the financial elite – the engine of the financial elite – as first and foremost against the people, and against the interests of the people, and on the same page have social security, or social insurance or a social security state, or provide for the unemployed and the poverty-stricken population. You cannot have social labor and democratic rights in a state that is participating in the European Union. Because the European Union was built from day one to support the financial elites’ interests. That’s why we believe that Britain has to go. It has to leave the European Union. It will make our struggle much easier. Because if Britain decides to get rid of the European Union, it will be much easier for us, to convince the Greeks that you don’t have to be afraid of anything. You see, bigger countries, huge economies, like the British, are leaving EU. So why not you? Simple.

As you told me one year ago, that basically the EU-led austerity – “made us less than human.” This is a general question. What is the current situation with pensions, social security, farmers? What is the economic situation in Greece at the moment since the past year?

I’ll give you official data: Now, if we take the middle family income, the average family budget. The income of this middle family budget is calculated according to the official data of 2014, because we don’t have any new data. We’re talking about 18,000 Euro per year. Ok? Back in 2010, it was 23,000. Now, we are at 18,000. Of course, you have enough money to buy the things you need, the consumer products, the things you need to support the family. To provide your family’s basic needs, you need 47,000 Euro. And you have an income of 18,000.

Is that all? No. You also have to pay for the bank loans another 2,500 per year. You have to pay extra taxes on your income. That’s another 3,700 per year. You also have to pay social insurance fees. That’s another 3,500 per year. If you put all this down, you’ll see that on an income basis of 18,000 per year, the obligations of the middle family, are up to 36,000-37,000 per year. Give me a situation similar to this and provide me with an alternative… There is no way you can get rid of that economic circumstances. You cannot even imagine how you can get rid of the depression we have here in Greece, and of course, how will the economy turn around. There is no way. There is just no way. We need more than double of the income for the middle family to keep up with the obligations. There is no way you can have that because we have to withstand austerity, we have the memorandums. Now in 2016, they say they need more than 2 to 4 billion more taxes out of the family budget, and this will destroy the basis of the social insurance system in order for the beneficiary to pay more fees and get less in pensions, in social security support.

What is the situation of homelessness at the moment?

We have a problem of homelessness, but right now because of the dispersion of the homes, in Greece, more than 75% of the population owns the apartments or the houses that they live in, so there is no huge problem. Of course, most of the families now own the houses of the apartments, but they were taken through loans from the banks, so the banks now are trying to confiscate the private property from them, but they didn’t dare, up till now, to do what they did in Spain or in the US.

Of course, they have the laws now. When we talked one year ago, they didn’t have the law, but now the banks do have the law on their side. The Left government provided the bankers with the legal status of what they have for foreclosures and confiscation, the same type of legal status they have in the US. This is the product of the Left government, not of the rightist or the Left government we had back then. The current Left government provides the legal tool for the banksters for foreclosures and to confiscate private property. It was out of the question, if we go back two or three years.

The Syriza government has been waiting for this issue of enacting foreclosures. And at some point, they will be forced to take action probably.

Yes, they will try. And they even voted for a law that allows the banks to sell overdue loans for the funds we call vultures. And right now one bank, one systemic bank, the Alpha bank, sold a package of overdue loans to a private fund for 3% of the nominal value. 3%. Right now in Greece we have 100 billion of overdue loans. Now, the bankers will sell these 100 billion overdue loans to vulture funds. For how much? For 3-5 billion. And I proposed to the government a simple solution: give the bankers the 3-5 billion, take the 100 billion nominal value of overdue loans and destroy them.

But they are not doing that…

No… not even to help the citizens who cannot pay for the labor men. They cannot provide because they don’t have jobs, they don’t have income. So, we pay the recapitalization of the banking system more than 60 billion Euros as taxpayers. 60 billion. And now Mr. Draghi wants the Greek taxpayer to pay another 14 billion Euros for the recapitalization of the bank system in Greece. Why don’t they give to the bankers at least 3 to 5 billion – that’s nothing, compared to what we gave already to the banks and what they are asking for – and take the bloody overdue loans and get rid of them. Leave the people alone.

But they aren’t doing it…

No. This government doesn’t do it.

I think it’s not even possible for the Government to take unilateral actions without the approval of the Troika…

Exactly. Because that’s the new matter about the Third Memorandum. We have a new memorandum, the third section of it. If you go back to the law that was passed by the Greek parliament on the 14 of August 2015, you will see in the third section of the memorandum that the government cannot do anything without the approval of the IMF or the European Commission and the European Central Bank. We are under an occupation regime. We are less than a colony. And we cannot provide even for the borders, to guard the borders of Greece. No. We do not even have a right to say a word about this thing. That is why we are less than a state, in international law terms.

This brings me to the question of the migration crisis which is facing Europe now. Obviously Greece has already so many big economic problems; now it also has to deal with Hotspots which are being imposed by the European Union, besides the fact that NATO decided to patrol in the Aegean supposedly to stop the coming of the migrants. This brings me to ask what do you think Greece should do about it if it could.

The first thing Greece has to do is to get rid of the Schengen Treaty and the Dublin Treaty in order to provide for the migrants and of course for the refugees coming from Syria. More than 60% of those coming from Syria, up to now, are refugees coming from the war. The first thing you have to do is to follow international law. And if you cannot afford to deal with the whole situation, if you have more than 1 million, a half a million refugees and migrants, call the United Nations agency to come in and provide financial help, provide for the infrastructure you need to provide for the refugees and migrants.

The first thing that you have to do is to get rid of the Dublin and the Schengen treaties, in order to follow international law. Let me give you an example: the same situation happened in Lebanon. Right now Lebanon is providing for more than 1,250,000 refugees. We’re talking about 25% of the Lebanon population. Who is talking about Lebanon? Nobody. Because Lebanon follows international law.

How so?

Since it is not a member of the European Union, Lebanon does not want to create a slave labor out of the refugees, and what they are doing is what international law provides in a similar situation. Draghi does not want that. The European Union also does not want that. They want to take the refugees and of course the migrants and provide their own labor markets with slave labor. And that’s the whole situation…

Let’s look at the things logically. The refugee coming from Syria or Iraq is going through the trouble. The first thing a law abiding state has to do is to provide him with all the papers the refugee needs, all the papers that say who a refugee is and who he is not.

Draghi does not do that. They subsidize the whole industry of providing slave labor to the EU through Greece. And of course, Greece as a state has to go to international bodies, like the International Maritime Organization and say: “look at Turkey, what are they doing? They are creating a situation in the Aegean. You have to take measures against that.”

Turkey is a member of the International Maritime Organization. The International Maritime Organization can decide that “we have a situation – a crisis – that is created by a member state, and we have to do something about it.” Now, Greece does not do that because it’s a member of the European Union. And the European Union decides what will happen to the Greek islands. And Greece is only a member of the whole thing. It is only to abide by the decisions made by Mr. Tusk, Mr. Juncker and Mr. Erdogan. That’s what we have right now. If we decide to provide the refugees the same type of asylum and infrastructure Lebanon provides it would be not a problem. Because you would give the refugee the same kind of international treatment as the international law provides and let him go wherever he likes. He wants to go to Germany – he may go to Germany.

And, we even could say that “Ok, we have refugees. From where? Syria. Who destroyed Syria? The United States. Ok, the United States must take 80% or 90% or 100% of the refugees from Syria.” You cannot destroy through war – a whole country – and then say “Oh, I have nothing to do with the refugee situation from that country.”

The same thing with Afghanistan and with Iraq. That’s the international law. If you remember back in Vietnam days when the southern Vietnam collapsed, what did the US do? They took more than a million Vietnamese refugees, I don’t remember for whatever reason, they took the Vietnamese refugees because they were involved in the Vietnam war. Now, what is going on in Syria? The same thing.

And I believe that the first countries that have to deal with the refugee problem are the United States and Russia. Because they are fighting on Syrian soil. And on top of that we need the Greek government, if we have a democratic government of course, to say, Ok, first and foremost, in order to deal with the refugee program, we need to stop the war in Syria. And of course, not only to stop the war, like they are doing right now, but establish law and order in Syria. And give back the situation to the lawful government – the Assad regime. Ok, I don’t believe in the Assad regime. But that’s the lawful government. And who is Mr. Obama or Mr. Putin or whoever to decide how many parts will be dissected, that Syria must be dissected, and for what reason…

Give back the national sovereignty to Syria. Take out the foreign armies and the mercenaries, everybody. And of course then you will see all the refugees, or most of the refugees, coming back to Syria. And let us provide investment infrastructure to Syria in order to rebuild Syria because they demolished the whole country. That’s how you deal with the refugee problem.

So I’m just trying to understand. This is a simple question. So the difference between Lebanon and Greece is that in the case of Lebanon, refugees are free to go elsewhere and in the case of Greece, the European Union…

They don’t have Hotspots. Of course, they do have infrastructure to provide for the refugees, with the help of the UN. But they are trying to deal with the problem in terms of the international law. With what international law provides for the refugee. A refugee is a sacred person. He’s escaping war or a regime. So you have to deal with him as a sacred person, to provide for him, and, of course, to give him the opportunity to go back to the country. He didn’t leave on his free will; he escaped from a situation. It’s not an opportunity for Germany or for France or for Poland or for the EU to have 2 million slave labor for their own labor market in order to bring down the wages and destroy the social infrastructure of the country so that the labor or the working class cannot fight against their own government or the European elite. A refugee is a sacred person. And you need to provide for him. And of course, do whatever you can, to stop the situation or to alter the situation that the refugee is escaping from. That’s our opinion.

How do you think the mechanism of the Hotspots will work in terms of slave labor?

It’s simple.In Greece, we already have a law passed back in 2012 that provides the ability for the government to take from the Hotspots whoever it is, either he’s an outlaw migrant or a refugee, and to provide labor supply in terms of whatever the government decides. For example, now we have a big situation with the farmers all over Greece. The government proposes to the farmers to give them free – without any charge – free slave labor from the Hotspots, and the government will subsidize the farmers for the slave labor of the migrants and the refugees working for them. That’s a way to buy out; it ‘s a way to buy the social consciousness of the farmers.

So why is the government subsidizing it, because it ends up being much cheaper?

Yes, of course. You’ll have cheap labor for yourself, and on top of that you’ll have all the income coming from the government, that normally will go for the refugees and the migrants – for the Hotspots – you’ll get the revenue as a farmer. And you’ll be provided with more income out of the slave labor you are using for every migrant or refugee you are occupying. It’s policy. It’s a policy proposition from the Greek government, the Left government for the farmers to keep them quiet and not to revolt against the memorandum policies. “I’ll provide for you slave labor, don’t worry. Go back to your farms.” That’s what the Left government is saying right now to the farmers.

But obviously for Greece to treat the refugees according to international law it would mean to leave the European Union first, but that’s impossible…

Yes. Because you have to get rid of Schengen Treaty and Dublin Treaty. The Dublin Treaty created a special situation in dealing with refugees and migrants for the EU. It created an international situation, because back then when they provided refugees with international law, back in the protocols in the 1950s, they thought of the refugee and the migrant situation as an international problem, not a European problem. An international problem. Now, the EU wanted to refurbish the whole situation as a European problem, which it isn’t.

That’s why they created the Dublin I and Dublin II treaties. For members of the EU to decide themselves what to do with refugees and migrants. Not according to international laws and protocols. No. But through their own private interests. That’s the privatization of an international problem.

Recently, as you obviously know, terrorists were found in Greece, trying to pass through. And what is very strange is how a caravan filled with AK47s and bullets managed to make its way, all the way, I think it was from Western Europe – Germany and Austria, all the way to Greece. Do you think there are flaws in the way the EU is managing its security?

Yeah, it’s a huge industry. And the banking system that supports this, the banking logistics – is based on the Greek bankers and the Cyprus banks. That’s why they are specially protected. No attorney, no justice system, can penetrate the banking system, and no one can say let’s see what is going on, who’s laundering money. Through what channels they are taking rights, or are there payoffs, things like that. We know that the Greek banking system and the Cypriot banking system, the systemic bank, they are first and foremost launderers of black money, coming from weapons, prostitution, and of course, migrants and refugees.

So the banks are complicit, in let’s call it, intentional lack of monitoring its security, allowing smuggling?

Exactly. That’s why they keep refinancing bankrupt institutions. Like the four systemic banks here in Greece that are bankrupt since 2009. And we know that. But they keep them afloat, although they are utterly bankrupt. We are under capital controls, as you know, from June 2015. Actually, we are under a banking moratorium. You cannot do free banking, or if you go to a bank and take the money out of your private account, you cannot do that here in Greece – since 27th of June if I remember correctly. They closed the banks from that point and on and they didn’t open them. And they are not going to open up the banks, only until they do a haircut to whatever they can to accounts, to whatever. So, they are totally bankrupt.

They are under – we are under – a banking moratorium or capital control as the Europeans call it, and on top of that we have to refinance and recapitalize the closed-down banks. That’s… as an economist I can say, that’s a historical phenomenon. You cannot do that. There is no other historical precedent… None. You cannot have a closed down banking system and refinance… Why do they do that? Because it’s the logistical basis of this huge laundering business. … for all Europeans. I’m talking about the cash flow coming from this, through Turkey, to the European banks.

The cash flow?

I’m talking about armaments, prostitution, and the commerce of human beings – refugees and migrants.

So I’ll just simplify so that people will understand. What you are saying is that there is the network of smuggling of prostitutions, of weapons, and also of drugs?

Yes.

Of drugs also, it goes to Turkish banks, and from Turkish banks it gets laundered again…to the European Union.

Through Greece. They are going to the huge banks, Deutsche Bank and others banks in the Europe.

So they carry the money on their bodies?

Yes. They want a free market for this kind of business. And we are a free market for this kind of business. Because Mr. Tusk, Mr. Juncker and Mr. Erdogan decide what is going to happen. For example, I’ll give you an example you probably don’t know. What Mr. Erdogan said to Mr. Tusk and to Mr. Jucnker back in November. Probably it was Russian intelligence that took the conversation and gave it to the Greek newspaper. Probably Russian intelligence, I don’t know. But the newspaper printed a week ago a conversation between Mr. Tusk and Mr. Juncker with Mr. Erdogan, discussing the situation with the Greek islands, the refugee and the migrant problem. And Mr. Erodgan asked not 3 billion but 9 billion. And when Mr. Juncker said to him, “I cannot provide such funds for Turkey,” Mr. Erdogan said, “you saw the drowned body of the 4-year-old in the Greek island”? – “Yes.” “How about sending you 14,000 such bodies to Greek islands?” – That’s what Mr. Erdogan said to Mr. Juncker and Mr.Tusk. And when Mr. Juncker said: “What do you want? Are we dealing with like you are a prince”? And Mr. Erdogan said: “Yes, I am a Prince. I’m an Ottoman Prince.”

So, you see, we are under a political mafia. And no one, even in Turkey or in the EU, can deal with this Mafiosi because we don’t have democracy or even parliamentarism to provide the people with a voice, or to have some people who will deal with it. They negotiate in the dark rooms. What the people could say a few decades ago – it is something like Nazism. That’s why we say that we are facing not the European Union but a new European Reich. Full fledged.

So what does Erdogan do with the money he gets?

Mr. Erdogan wants to provide new funds to the industry we are talking about in Turkey. It’s official policy. And you can have illegal planning: take 100 refugees with your boat or whatever it is and bring them to the Greek islands. So you have the NGOs on the Greek islands. In my opinion, most of the NGOs working on the Greek islands are working for smugglers. Smuggling people.

Let me give you an example: more than 10,000 children coming out of the sea and identified by NGOs – “saved” by NGOs – they were lost afterwards. No trace. No trace at all. While going to the EU. About 10,000 children. Who is responsible for this? We’re talking about a massacre. Because, the children up to 14, 15 years old, are going to the European Union, for what? For prostitution and of course for illegal forms of human organs. 10,000 children. And that’s the situation the EU created in our armed forces with the support of our own government.

What do you think can be done about the fact that a lot of Greek people are simply apathetic and they don’t see the connection between the Euro and their own economic situation. The longer they wait, the worse it’s going to get. Because there are growing chances, the war in Syria is going to get much worse. If that happens, Greece, as a member of NATO will get involved in the war in Syria.

I know. And we are very very fearful right now about the rise of that possibility. Because NATO is in the Aegean not for the refugees or the migrants. They are here to confront Russia. Ok?

Russian forces in Syria?

Yes. We’re talking about a huge naval force from Russia coming from Crimea and the Baltics and for the first time after the 19th century the Aegean is closed off. They cannot get safe passage to Crimea. You can see what is going on?

But how will boats manage to block Russian forces?

Because the Aegean is now out of reach for the Greek government and nominally for the Turkish government. Who is going through the Aegean is up to NATO to decide, who is to have safe passage. NATO decides. Not Greece, not Turkey, not even international law. You can say that according to international law I can have safe passage… No! Because NATO is doing surveillance all over the Aegean and NATO decides who is going to pass. Because let’s say the Russian warships are working for refugees or for migrants, whatever. They can say whatever they like. Who is going to say otherwise? – Russia. Oh, so what. That’s what happened here in Greece.

Of course, we lost our sovereignty, and on top, we’re totally involved in the war creation process of NATO against Russia. And of course, that’s why the Russians, Mr. Putin, agreed on a set-back in Syria. Agreed on a ceasefire in Syria that provides for the mercenaries. Because the mercenaries were to use the ceasefire situation to refurbish their forces with new material and of course ammunition and, of course, men, coming especially from Turkey.

Then the talks in Geneva collapsed and then NATO decided to go to the Aegean…

Yeah, exactly.

The talks collapsed pretty much with the support of the US…

And now, Mr. John Kerry, can go to Lavrov and say to him: “Ok, you have two possible situations. Either your fleet is cut off from Crimea, and we’re talking about a huge fleet that’s with cruise missiles, the major ships of the Russian Crimea fleet. Either you lose your fleet, or we decide together to get rid the Assad Regime.”

And that’s right now what is happening. Of course, Russia tries to manipulate or whatever but what is happening right now in Syria is exactly that. Even with the declarations of Mr. Steinmeyer two days ago. What Mr. Steinmeyer, the secretary of the foreign policy of the German government said was that the only thing we need right now, is that Tehran and Moscow will persuade Mr. Assad lay down his arms. That’s the whole plan. To dissect Syria, into 3 or 4 zones. Similar to what they did in Tunisia, or Libya, or Iraq. Same situation. And after Syria, they will go on. They will go to Jordan, they will go to Iran, they will go to Turkey itself. And they will dissect again and again the whole Middle East region. And of course, us too… But we are easy to be dissected.

This leads me to a different question: The European elites must be aware of the social unrest here, so; how do you think they plan to continue?

I believe that by the end of 2017 – this is my own conclusion – we will not have Greek forces involved either in national defense or security. Inner security will be provided from NATO. Even the army of Greece will be demolished and only a few units will remain, just like in Bulgaria or Albania. And they are going to be totally submitted to NATO.

And right now, we have on the northern borders of Greece, Academi and Group 4 forces, provided with Frontex budgets, right now.

Where exactly?

Sérres and Komotini. Greece and Macedonia – Greek Macedonia. And everybody knows that. The Greek army knows, the Greek police knows that. But it was decided by the Europeans.

But what are their purposes for being there exactly?

Officially to provide security service guarding the northern borders of Greece because Greece cannot provide such level of security. Let me give you an example of the whole situation, of how dire it is.

In the third memorandum, you will see that we have to provide less and less for our national defense. The state budget of 2016 provides 200 million, not billion, 200 million to the federal defense budget. In the 2015 budget, the national defense budget was 500 million. In one year’s time, the Europeans decided that the national budget must go down by 300 million. With only 200 million Euros, you cannot even pay the wages of the military personnel you employ as a state. On the budget of 2017, the memorandum says that the national budget will have to go down even further.

So in the future, we will see a situation whereamidst social unrest, Greeks will find themselves confronted by mercenaries, Academi?

Exactly. When you will have such a situation in Greece, I can guarantee you, the Greek people will take arms. It was done back in the 20th century a lot of times and it will be done again. Of course, we don’t want that, to go down that road. But we will travel this road, if we cannot do otherwise. We will fight for our country. Our forefathers fought for our country. We will fight even with arms, if we are against foreign troops, mercenaries or whomever. We will fight.

Of course I believe that in 2016 there will be a social resurrection here in Greece, one way or the other. I don’t know which way the social unrest will go. But we will have social unrest. If you walk on the streets Greece you will see a lot of people now, saying: “Ok, the situation is over our heads. I cannot afford any longer to stay silent. I have to do something.”

Ok, we have the farmers. We have the lawyers. We have the medical workers. All over Greece, the social rage is climbing. We will have a social unrest… and we will try, through EPAM of course, to make it a participation, to pave social unrest and to create a situation that can end up in a social revolution. Because the only way we can get rid of the whole regime is through a social and political revolution.

When we are talking about creating a social revolution we are not talking about – in the same way – like we’re expecting an attack on the Winter Palace like the Russians did back in 1917. No. We are talking about the organization of a huge part – a major part of the Greek population in my opinion – that will demand the demolition of the whole regime.

We will see that. And I believe that we will see that in 2016. I don’t believe that it will be before August. After we see the weather in Greece opening up, you will see that most of the major movements, the social movements here in Greece, they are coming out like when Spring is coming. When we have spring in terms of the weather, it’s the same thing with society. Something like a natural biological process in society. You have a spring in society. And you will have that in 2016.

Otherwise, I don’t know what we will face in 2017 and in 2018. Probably, we will have to fight through other means.

By the way, speaking of Iran, I read a report on this on one website that Albania received about 2,000 fighters of an Iranian opposition group.

Yeah, that’s true.

But why?

Well, let me give you a scenario. I don’t know if it will come out… but it’s a kind of scenario that happens in Greece especially on a military level, and of course, with the security forces.

They are expecting some kind of a UÇK situation on Macedonia or even closer to the Albanian border. A UÇK situation is like a thousand, two thousand mercenaries, coming and creating a situation. Like the UÇK did in Serbia, in Kosovo.

The KLA?

Yes, the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]. We call them the UÇK. Mercenaries. NATO mercenaries. It’s very easy nowadays. We don’t have the means to guard the borders of our country. By 2017, we will have foreigners guarding our borders. Especially mercenaries, Academi and Group 4. British multinationals and American multinationals – the corporation created out of Blackwater. They already have an agreement with the Frontex organization to provide security services.

So, it’s quite easy. Who is going to stop them? Nobody. Except of course the Greek people. And they have in their minds the same situation. They will create a monstrous regiment, leading the section of Macedonia, the mercenaries will probably invade, and come down to Athens. And when the Greek citizen sees refugees, Greek refugees, coming… they will be frightened so much, they will accept anything. That’s the NATO scenario.

Of course, our history is quite different. If the Greek sees a Greek citizen coming as a refugee from a foreign invasion, you will see what will happen. You will see the same thing that happened back in 1940. Barefoot, they went up to the Albanian mountains fighting against the Italian fascists. No guns. No political leadership. With the military dictatorship and fascist dictatorship here in Greece. And the Greek people went up there without even stopping. Because back then we had more casualties from the winter than from the Italian fascists. Because our forefathers had nothing. And they fought back then. Nobody believed back then…

Even Ciano who designed the Italian offensive in Greece said back then when a British diplomat asked him, “How sure you can be that through your offensive Greece will collapse in a few days”? And Ciano said, “We bribe the whole regime, the Metaxas regime.” It was a fascist regime. And what happened? Every Greek, even my grandfather, who walked with a limp, he was one leg short from birth, he went on foot from Kalamata to the Albanian border. We are talking about more than 1,000 KM. On foot. Without even a gun. He took a gun from a dead Italian fascist and fought down to the end. You will see the same thing happen again. They don’t know the Greek people.

Of course, it’s easy to say that if you take the Greek and close him in a dark room for days and then tell him “You know, don’t open the door because the light will blind you.” Well, probably most of the Greeks will decide not to open up the door. But when you squeeze him against the wall, he will decide, either to be a traitor or a hero. And most of them will decide to become heroes.

It’s easier for Greek, even if you see the history, to give up his life, rather than to give up his watches or his wallet or whatever. It’s easier for him, to decide to give up the life.

Why would NATO want to do such a thing? To prevent a social rest?

No, no. It wants to create a corridor in the Balkans.

NATOdoes?

Yeah. A corridor coming through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and Albania. It’s a buffer zone to control the whole Balkans.

And then NATO will come in to restore order…

Exactly. And through that you’ll have gas pipes, or installations, whatever. It’s only for foreign forces to control the whole Balkans. And of course, through the Balkans you control Central Europe. You control Russia. If you’ll go back you’ll see the same thing as the Truman Doctrine in the new situation. What we had back then – the Truman Doctrine that took us into a civil war in Greece – it’s the same thing.

They will create this buffer zone, they will reduce Southern Greece, in order to provide for an installation of Israeli forces and NATO forces, in order to have a lever, a foothold for Israeli defense. Because they want Israel to be like it is right now. It’s a constable for the US imperialism in the Middle East. They need it. By destroying the whole Middle East you need to provide Israel with a backbone of defense – a buffer.

Let’s go back to 1967, when Israel started the Six Day War against Egypt. The US asked the military junta we had back then – created by NATO here in Greece, – to provide Crete for military installations for the Israeli air force against Egypt. Back then even the military junta thought of the political reactions here in Greece and they didn’t accept. Right now, the Left government signed an SOFA , a treaty, with Israel. And now Israel is creating a military airport, in Kastelli in Crete, and bigger military installation of radars in Crete. They are creating installations all over Crete. Crete is another, you know, unsinkable airbase, it’s like a…

An aircraft carrier.

An unsinkable aircraft carrier for NATO. And the Left government signed all of this, for NATO and Israel. We are the only state, besides the United States, to have SOFA treaty with Israel. Nobody else, nobody else. Only us and the United States.

That’s why NATO and US allies like Israel need it: from Larissa downwards to south of Greece, for military and geostrategic purposes. From Larissa upwards – that’s Macedonian Greece – it’s going to become a buffer zone to control the whole Balkan situation.

But that’s obviously not a long-term solution for them. It just means perpetual war and conflict.

Exactly. We have a perpetual war on the financial market. So as long as we have that kind of functional situation of the world economy, we have perpetual war. 100%.

And in my opinion, we have a third world war. It started in 2014. Why? Because it was the first year that 11% of the world population was involved in military action or worse. The first time since the Second World War. And from that point and on, you will see every year, 2015, 2016, more people coming in… That’s world war. And we will probably the surpass the second world war.

But on a different plan, we will have perpetual war all over the place. With Rogue states, civil wars, demolition wars, the destruction of nations and states, things like that. That’s the new form of the world war.

And that is inevitable because of the financial support of the major world powers.

They need states, nations and people to be liquid as capital.

Maybe you can talk about that a little bit…

It’s easy. If I am Mr. Buffet, I know we are not talking about Buffet but a financial elite… in order to create new situation of more profit for my own investment capital, I cannot deal with different states. And I have more then, nominally, we have more than 327 trillion dollars in terms of investment capital worldwide. Controlled by 40 banks… even less. 40 banks. 327 trillion… We have a GDP, a world GDP, from 75 to 77 trillion dollars. And they are only for investment. We’re not talking about derivatives or other aspects of the financial market. We’re talking about 327 trillion dollars. So in order to create opportunities for my capital to provide new, or even more profit, for my portal, we have to destroy and re-destroy the whole… I cannot provide more out of the normal economic cycle. We have to destroy and recreate the cycle itself. And there’s no way I can do that if we have normal states or people or national economies, things like that. We tried that through financial means. We saw that. And we saw how the whole market was destroyed back in 2007 up to 2008. After that, they recreated the whole market and right now they have even a worse situation then back in 2007. So, in order to subsist that kind of a situation in the financial market, we need an army, we need political means – the economy cannot provide any more. You will see that the big international corporations are avoiding from investing. They keep the money on the coffers, and they are using it re-buying equities in the financial market. Things like that. They cannot…

They buy what?

Equities, their own equities. You will see the world commerce going down. So the normal world economy cannot afford to go up on the same level as the financial market. And the difference between the level of the real economy and of the fictitious economy is even bigger than that. What covers the difference is the political means. Creating opportunities for the fictitious capital. That’s the only way. There’s no other way.

That’s why when the equities market went down back in 2014, the US decided that “Ok, forget all about lowering the defense budget. No. Forget all about it. Give more bills to the defense budget.” From 2014, you have the advancement of the defense budget in the US. The same in all over neighboring countries. You will see, new wars erupting all over the planet.

How will they happen in NATO countries? The migrants or…

All over. Germany, went from 4 to 5 billion – if I remember the data correctly from the first budget – right now on 2015, do you know how much was the defense budget of the Federal Republic of Germany? 162 billion euros. That’s huge. And for what? To re-create a world-class army. That’s why the US wanted to give the leadership of the maritime mission of the NATO mission in the Aegean to Germany. It’s the first time after World War II, after the Bonn Treaty of 1951, for the Germans to only participate but to take leadership of a military mission. It’s the first time. And of course, Germany is a world class economy. And they want to keep that kind of status in the world economy. They tried a military partnership with Russia back in 2010. But, of course, the US destroyed that. They tried, through the EU, to create the so-called European Army, the European military force. But it was destroyed by NATO. And now, they are going through NATO military force with the agreement of the US.

That’s why they decided about the Aegean, 4 days after the General Secretary of NATO said it is Ok for the US to quadruple the military installations and military personnel in Europe. Ok? That’s a huge change in the US policy of NATO. And of course, “to defend Europe against Russian aggression.” All these political changes and developments you will see on the background of the situation in the financial markets. And what we have now is that even the BRICS economies cannot provide for the world economy. After 2008, we had the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, the world economy, even the US and, of course, the banks, the economies of capitalism and imperialism, and they had a way out. Through BRICS they invested a lot… and now the BRICS are coming down, especially in China or even in India, Brazil, even in Russia they have big problems. Of course, they cannot do anything. China cannot do anything. Because these are totally dependent on a world scale demand. If you don’t have a world demand for your own economy to grow 8% every year or 10% every year, then you have to recreate your own economy on a basis of a local market. But in doing that, you have to provide your own citizens with more income. More labor rights. And more protection for social situations. Can China, the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese Government do such a turn? No, I don’t believe that they can do it. Because it would be a fortune for the Chinese to get out of the economic model they had from the 1980s. They cannot do such a social political turn for their own economy. They will destroy the whole system, the political system in China. And if you do that, you will have a Chinese working class demanding more and more and more. And the capitalist world economy would lose the Chinese wage. So, the only way for the world system to go ahead is only through war. There is no other way. They cannot invest anymore. Only in a total destruction. Perpetual war.

But, obviously, that’s not a long-term solution. So we’re just going to see more and more wars throughout the EU?

Exactly. Or up to the point where you will have people’s revolutions – people who want to take back their own country and rebuild it. And in order to rebuild it they have to get rid of all the connections they have with the financial markets, the loan sharks, investment banks, or whatever. That’s the only solution. The alternative.

But any country which would do a revolution, of some kind of gain, any country which would reclaim its sovereignty… would find itself under attack, will find itself under debt, so…

Well, yes. But it’s difficult to find who will fight against sovereignty. It’s difficult for NATO or whomever to create a war situation against Greece because you don’t go up against people that are united and decisive enough to fight for their own country. That’s why they didn’t go against Iran. You will see them trying to use the difference between the government and the people, like they did in Syria. You have the regime, the Assad regime, which is not – you know – “people friendly” let’s say, and create a situation where you can demolish the social cohesion of the whole country. So if you have a social revolution or a popular revolution in Greece and the people are decisive enough to fight for the country, no NATO, no noone can go up against such a people. Or of course we will face an economic war. So what? We don’t want to be part of the financial market. We are not going out on the financial market for loans. We can do without loans. We are not in need of them. Greece is a small economy.

… Greece can be self-sustaining in terms of producing its own food.

Exactly. It’s easy. It’s easy for us to find the oil we need for our economy. Or the industrial profits, or the industrial technology we need. If we want to rebuild our own industries of textiles, we’ll go to Bangladesh, we won’t go to the US. In Bangladesh we can find whatever we like, in industrial technology, in the textile industry. And we will rebuild it.

But I’m not sure how… if you already made the case that NATO and the financial system, at the current crisis that we’re in, how it profits from and encourages and is causing more and more wars. By that same logic then, if we follow that logic, any place that would have a revolution, NATO would attack that place…

Yeah. They will try…

Maybe the people will fight back, as in the case if they would have invaded Iran. But they would still try…

They will try. They will try by going from the backdoor, you know. Not through the front door. Because by going from the front door you risk a revolution in your own country. And they don’t want that. They want to be legitimized in the people’s eyes, even in their own country. The people would have to say that the Greeks are wrong, and NATO is right. For what? Because the Greeks asked for the country back? And because they said no loans, no nothing, we don’t need anything from you?

“We’re going to work our country and prosper. That’s the only thing we are asking for… And of course, we want democracy.”

They need some kind of an excuse. They cannot go and destroy… For example, in Libya, they had the excuse of Gaddafi. In Syria, Assad. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein. In Iran, the Mullahs. In Greece, what? They are leaving the EU? They want to rebuild their own country with their own abilities? And to rely on whatever their own country can provide? It’s quite difficult. Of course, they can say whatever they like. But if we do a good job, if we provide for the people, which is what we are saying. If we create a new kind of a situation, a real democratic situation – not, you know, a sign of democracy – but a real democracy, it’s very very difficult, even for the CIA, to create a situation like this. Even to create a situation we see in Venezuela. They forgot that a revolution everywhere in the world, if you want a revolution, you have to trust the people, not the regime, whatever good it is, not the party, no. The people. The grassroots. And if you forget that, you will pay for that. And that’s what happened back in the Chavez era in Venezuela. Now they are paying for that. Create a grassroots democracy. Take to the people your own things. Give the people the ability to decide…

How are they paying for it in Venezuela?

Because they create a democratic regime, Ok. But they have an election system that provides for someone who takes 44% of the electorate to have 65% in the national assembly. Why? Of course, the Chavistas say this is all work of the reactionary forces. Ok. And now they are facing their own medicine. That’s why I’m talking about going to the people, giving them the ability to decide themselves. Through communes, through councils, through whatever you can find. Let the people’s imagination decide.

Since I was there and studied a little bit my impression of Venezuela is that… their mistake was that they didn’t follow the Cuban way. I’ll tell you what I mean. Basically, first of all, Maduro wasn’t strong enough about crime, there’s a lot of hoarding done by poor people…

Exactly.

And secondly, when you have elections every four years, and you have a socialist government running, you create a situation where you have populism. You just give free goods to the people and you don’t try to do anything that would be painful, like cracking down on crime. And then at some point, the more populist you become, the more they get tired of you, and then they throw you away.

The opposition had two major weapons against Maduro: inflation and crime. What can you do? First of all, socialize the money circulation process. They did not do that.

How do you do that?

You take the banks and destroy the private banking system. Destroy it. Through their own means, through money. Give money to the people, in terms of income or in terms of jobs.

They didn’t do that…

No. They let the private banking system create money through debt. That’s totally destructive. Even nowadays the Venezuelan government is indebted to Goldman Sachs. Are you crazy? What are you doing? And the other situation is exactly the corruption and the crime problems.

The crime situation: You can deal with it in two separate ways. One is the security forces problem. And they had the security forces problem. That’s why we had in 2002 and 2004 a situation of a coup d’état, through the security forces in Venezuela. So they didn’t solve that. They did a, you know, tried to solve it through the personality of Chavez. But that’s Ok; that’s one way to say “Kill my leader in order to leave me without a head and then deal with me easily.” The other way is to provide for the society itself to fight against crime, especially in barrios, and organize the society. We know that. Even from the US history of fighting crime back in the Roosevelt years. The society itself. Not the police, or the justice system. The society itself. Organize.

What would be the incentive? You had a situation in Venezuela where people could get a PhD, they could do a Master and instead they chose to join a gang. What would be the incentive for communities to crack down on crime…?

You provide good jobs for the people.

When you nationalize the…

Yes. And good income out of the good jobs. And more leisure time in order to get involved in the political situation. Provide more of a decision-making process for the people. For, let’s say, a convention in every neighborhood. Call the people from every neighborhood to decide what to do in the neighborhood. And whatever the people decide, it will be implemented. They will implement their own decision. Through that, they will fight to implement their own decision. They will be responsible for implementing their own decision. And through that you will fight gangs, you will fight everything. Most of the people who join gangs do that because they want a different type of an organization. And they find that through gangs. No. They can give them a different organization, and through that organization, they can decide and implement what they decide. They have the first and the last word in their own situation. In the social and political situation they are facing. And through that, who is going to join the opposition or to vote for multimillionaire that doesn’t care even for the people who are working for them. Nobody. Well, you know only the elite or a quasi-elite. How much? 5% of the population? 10% of the population? Whatever.

That’s the same conclusion you draw from the revolutionary process all over Europe from day one. Even if you go back to the great French revolution, or the Paris Commune’s revolution or whatever. You will see the same pattern. If you lose track of money, and if you lose track of grassroot democracy, you will lose permanently. That’s what happened even in the Russian revolution.

But in Cuba they are…

Well, yeah. But in Cuba, it’s a very different story. Because what they realized, even the American elite, realized by now is that the Cuban Revolution survived because of the encirclement of the American hegemony. Because the people, the patriotic people, the Cuban people, created a huge form against any foreign oppression or invasion. So even if the Cubans have any complex about the Castro regime or whatever, Ok, leave it aside, we’ll fight against any kind of foreign invasion and recreation of the Batista regime.

Now, the American polity, the political elite, acknowledge that by going through the back door. They tell to Raul Castro, “Ok. Let’s talk. Let us give you a little bit of money, a few dollars. Instead of having the Americans flying through Canada, Vancouver or Montreal and going to Cuba, Ok, let them go in easily.” They will do the same thing, or try – let’s hope that the Cubans, or the Cuban Party, draw the conclusions we are drawing right now. If they keep the bureaucracy, the party, the state bureaucracy in tact, they will lose the country. One way or another. Because when you have the bureaucracy, it’s easy for someone like the US to buy out their way into the country. No questions asked. We saw that back in the Soviet Union. In a few years’ time, you will see the same. The same one, in a few years’ time, I’m talking about 3 or 4 years, became the worse type of Capitalism in Russia. Party of state bureaucrats. The same thing with Cuba.

I don’t believe that Cuba has any other way out because it has to go through negotiations with the US. But it has to recreate the state apparatus. Give more freedom. Let go of the war-type organization of the society and the economy. Give more space for the people. Invest in the people’s opinion and give them more. Give them more. It’s the only way to defend the regime, of course, and the party – against the new invasion, the invasion of US “friendship” and the takeover of Cuba…

You can fight it easily, but you have to change your own mindset. You see. The type of Ernesto Che Guevara or Fidel Castro type with military clothes has passed… You cannot fight the imperialism, the new stage of imperialism, through these things. Of course, you have to keep up your military alert up to the most possible scenario… you can have a US invasion against you in matter of days. But through that, give more power to the people. Grassroots power, to decide their own decisions. Give them the space to make mistakes. So what?

Going back to Venezuela, some people suggested that if the pro-Chavista military will take over the country that could stabilize things more, they can bring back order…

I don’t know.

Because the way things are going now the opposition will take over the country.

I know, I know. And I see Maduro’s declarations. It’s a very very risky business. If the military decides to come in, you create a precedent that everyone can use. Even the opposition. And the opposition is far more advanced in these matters than you are, then a movement like the Chavistas or Maduro’s PSUV party. The opposition can do whatever they like. They have the backing of the US.

But there are generals who are different, who have good relations with Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran…

I know, I know. But what about a civil war?

That will happen anyway.

I believe that if they try that, they will have the possibility to create a situation of a civil war for decades. Like in Colombia. You see, a civil war since the 1960s. It’s very difficult, a situation like this.

Either way, if the opposition takes over the Chavistas will do a civil war…

I don’t believe it’s an easy way out right now. What they had to do- they didn’t do, years back. Now, it’s very difficult to choose. Whatever you chose, you’ll have cons and…

But in this kind of a situation you have to make an imperfect decision.

Yeah, exactly.

…And I think the military can make the situation better for everyone.

If you have the military, and at the same time you will have a popular movement, and the popular movement will try to recreate from the bottom-up the whole situation- that’s a good thing. Of course, it’s a risky business, but that’s a good thing. But in order to do that, you cannot stop at anything. If you use a knife, use it well, without any hesitation. I’m talking in a matter of time, and I’m for it, Ok. If you have to use it, use it. You don’t mess around, use it. If you decide that the whole situation is up to cutting some throats, cut them. No questions asked. Cut them. In a few day’s time, in order to pacify the whole situation. If you prolong it, you create more strife. And that’s my opinion. If you decide that the only way out is using the military, do it. And do it in 24 hours, get rid of them all. And then find a way to legitimize. Are they traitors? Ok, they are traitors. Hang them. And let history judge.

From that time on, you will work to put the people in front of the whole situation. And from that point on you will recreate the whole regime, from the bottom-up. A grassroots democracy. And through that everybody, at the end, will say, Ok, it was a situation. And of course, go out to the people and take the blame yourself. You will say that “Ok, it was my fault, as a movement, that we came to that point. We made certain mistakes. We are not going to do that anymore. We will fight for our country because we are facing an invasion, it is a new type of invasion than Syria, but we will fight,” if you decide to use the military. And tell to the people: “Ok, we made the situation worse but we will rectify, with you. And from that point and on, you [the people] will decide, and we will follow.” That’s the only way, if you come to this. And that’s what we said about Greece. If we come to this situation where we have to use weapons or arms to deal with the enemy, we will do that. No hesitation. No way around it. No. We will do that. And we will do that with the most resourceful and efficient way we can do that. In order to resolve the whole situation in the smallest possible time. No prolonging, no nothing. We will fight. We will get rid of them. And then our recreate our own country, we will build a true democracy. And that’s what back in the 40s, the national revolution movement against the Nazi occupation did. Up in the mountains. From day one, they created a democracy for the people. It was very good. But they did the same mistake again. They didn’t trust the people, the grassroots people. And on a specific… the leadership was not adequate to deal with the political situation and accepted the presence of the British military in the country and that was the start of the civil war.

Their mistake was that they didn’t believe in the people. They fought for the people, but they didn’t believe…

The people need to be educated for you to really believe in them…

No. I believe that the people, when they start to fight, they learn from their own experience. Let’s see, you can see the Egypt situation. When the people without a political leadership or a political program, learn how to deal with the government, and how to dethrone a government or a regime – the Mubarak regime – it’s something that, you know, it’s written on the genes, on the people’s genes. They know the way. If they get rid of the fear of dealing with the regime or the government, then it’s easy, to topple one government, and then topple another government. Of course, when you have a political program it is easy to topple a government and create a new political situation. That’s the deficiency of the Egypt situation right now. But the people know how to deal with them…

But that’s only possible when the people reclaim their rights.

Exactly. You cannot have a successful revolution or social insurrection without a political program, a very specific political program. Ok, we don’t want them. We have to know what we want. What will succeed after the toppling of the government or the regime.

That’s where we are trying to organize, and we are trying to educate the people politically. You know, we need democracy. But what kind of democracy? We don’t need any type of democracy; we need grassroots democracy. We need the people to decide, not only every four years but every time any serious situation involving the people comes. To involve the citizens. To create a situation that even one citizen can make a difference.

Why in the world would Merkel want to accept millions of migrants to Germany after she said in the past that multiculturalism failed?

The main problem of the German economy is the export of capital. The net investment position of the German economy is about 26% of the German GDP. It’s a huge provider of capital for the national market. 26%, out of 20% before the EU. So the main strength of the German economy is to keep exporting capital. It’s a more typically imperialist economy compared to the US. Like an old European imperialist economy. Where I need to export capital in order to provide for the financial and economic elite.

In order to do that, it has to squeeze down all the labor costs and the social costs.

Ok, they did that for 20 years. Now they are facing a social situation. They cannot squeeze now, even more, the German labor or the German working class. They need some external force. The Germans know. The Germans know from the 60s. In order to create a German miracle back then they wanted millions of immigrants. That’s the same thing right now. But the difference is back then, it was a different world situation and European situation. A different capitalism, let’s say. They tried, most of them, especially the German trade unions, they tried to take most of the immigrant people, to take them and create a new kind of a German citizen. Now there is no more of that. “We need, immigrants for the specific time of staying in Germany.” “We need – the German oligarchy needs – a few hundred thousand or 1 million immigrants only for a specific time now. We need to get rid of them as soon as they start asking for rights.”

And how will they do that?

Easy. They take them back to Greece. Easy.

It will create a civil war. You can just do that easily…

So what. They did that.

So there could be a civil war in Germany?

Yes. Because the Germans now – the German worker or the German middle class will lose everything. And that’s why you see Nazi parties in Germany coming up, especially in Bavaria. All over Germany you see people, political factions, that they say that they are not Nazis but Ok, over the political rhetoric you will see that Nazism is coming up again in Germany. Based on the social situation created by that policy.

But not everyone who opposes migration in Germany is a Nazi. They have a right, would you say they have a right to oppose migration?

Yeah, of course. I do. The difference between the Nazis, is the same thing like in the middle war years. The Nazis weren’t against migration. They were for migration, of course using them as slave labor. During the Nazi regime there were 7.5 million migrants working in Germany as slaves. There were more migrants than at any other time in German history. So, they were not against migration; they were for.

Of course, you had… it was like Marx said. The capitalists are for migration using them in order to bribe their own working class. The same thing happened with the Nazis. They were using slave labor in order to bribe the German working class to accept the Nazi regime. Bribing them or through the army or providing more for the Germans against the slave labor force from Eastern Europe or from all over Europe. They were working for jobs the German working man didn’t want; the jobs were not respectful enough. They were working for less than trash, Ok? And of course, all during the war, the German soldier coming from the working class, had the ability to loot the whole Europe to provide for the family. And that’s how, more or less, it was a blind eye, even for the German working class, a blind eye for what the Nazis did all over Europe, and of course, the death camps and things like that. It’s something you know; it was a bribe. Of course, it was quite different under a totalitarian regime. But it was exactly the utmost scale of what the British imperialists did with the British working class using the slave labor of the Irish back in the 19th century. That’s why Engels and Marx said you have to get rid of the bulk of the Irish, in order for the British working class to become revolutionary. And first and foremost, you have to give national sovereignty for the Irish in order for them to stay in their own country and not to come into Britain. It’s the same thing.

What I found interesting is as you said, just as there is a farmers protest here and entire farms are being taken over by corporations and Monsanto’s power grows more and more, we’re seeing the same crisis in the US. Because the government is taking – from what I learned – the government is taking land from private farmers and ranchers, to create a national park, and then they sell off the area to private corporations, even areas with uranium. So what happened now in Oregon, is that a lot of farmers and ranchers, white farmers and ranchers, came out to protest against the government. But the interesting thing is, that the American Left who you would think would be the first ones to join – didn’t join. So what is your opinion about that?

Well, in my opinion, most of the Left, even in Europe and the United States, lost the ability to know or to acknowledge the real problems. In order to provide a revolutionary movement, let’s say. If we consider the Left to be a revolutionary force, you have to know the grassroots’ problem. You are fighting for the working class, that in order become a dominant class, it has to be a dominant class for the nation. That is what the Communist Manifesto said back in 1845. Marx said that the working class doesn’t have countries. But at the same time he said that since the working class has to gain power, it must become the dominant class of the nation. A nation is not something you sign off at the doorsteps of the country or on the constitution. Nation is something that comes from the bottom-up that creates a society. A place where someone can fight for rights, for the rights to self-government. If you lose sight of that, it’s easy to cross sides and to become part of the dominant class and adopt the ideology of imperialism. See how easy it is nowadays internationally to become mixed up with cosmopolitanism – the ideology of imperialism. “You don’t need nations.” Even in our own country, we have Left forces, saying that because of the migrants and the refugee crisis, “Let’s get rid of the national borders.” Ok. NATO did that for us. That’s what NATO did. So, the extreme left, let’s say, the most radical left, by saying “Let’s get rid of the national borders,” invited actually NATO to do that. That’s why I went out and said that “Ok, the radicals of Left saying that are only agents of NATO imperialism.” It’s the same thing. We’re fighting for the people first and foremost, for everyone who has the right to own a land in the country, as a farmer or as a citizen, to have his own traditions, beliefs, even a religion. I don’t believe in any religion but I will fight to death for my people to have their right to have their own religion. That’s what Ernesto Che Guevara said about the theology of liberation in Latin America. He was not a religious man. But he fought and said that a revolutionary or liberation theology was part of parcel of national liberation movements in Latin America. You can see that even in Greece.

For the people in order to become free, first and foremost they have to have national self-determination. National sovereignty. To become a nation. To become a nation is where the last of the last of the citizens has the right to create the state that the citizen lives in. That’s what nations is all about. And on top of that he has the ability, has the right, to create his own tradition, it’s own art, civilization. We don’t have to earn a civilization. We have it. Human civilization, created from different cultures, different historical types of civilization. Every type of civilization, of people’s civilization, has the right, to become the dominant civilization in its own country. And by dominant civilization, I don’t mean “get rid of the minority.” No. Every citizen has the right. In order to do that we have to have national sovereignty. I believe in the Greek tradition. I’m proud of the Greek tradition. Because I know the Greeks that have fought for, the Greeks that came out of the revolution or war of independence, like the US historical textbook I am talking about, and the major slogan from the period was “Freedom or Death.” We were the first people who said “Freedom or Death.” Not “Patria O Muerte” [Homeland or Death] like the Latin Americans. We said that also. But we said “Freedom or Death.” We were fighting not only against Ottomans but against all the empires of Europe, the holy alliance. And I am proud of that tradition. And I have the right to keep to that tradition. And to keep calling myself “I am a Greek.” And since I am a Greek I have a huge tradition looking back. And since I am a Greek, I am living in Greece, I have to fight for democracy. Because it’s my tradition. It’s not only a political demand, it’s my tradition. It was here that the first fight for democracy, real democracy, took place, going back to the classical time. So it is my tradition.

It’s only a world tradition. It’s my tradition, first and foremost. And that’s why they are fighting against Greece. They want to destroy the Greeks. That’s why they slander Greeks. That they are nowadays Jews for Europe. What the Nazis said about the Jews back in the middle war years, they are saying now about the Greeks. Why? Because they want to destroy the classical tradition of Greece. And the classical tradition of Greece was about democracy. Was about how to provide for the people. Demos we called that. The power of Demos, the power of the people. And they recreate the whole classical tradition, through their own imperialist aims.

They say in Berlin, in Paris, in London, and even in Washington, that they are the continuers of the classical tradition. No, the continuers are us. That’s why I see a civilizational collusion. Different civilizations. And I’m not talking about high from bullshit. I’m talking about real civilizations. Our civilization, even through our religion, it’s not mine but most of the Greeks, we’re talking about free will. The Greek Orthodox Church is based on free will. It’s not like Catholicism or Protestantism. We believe in free will. Because even Christianity had to adopt to the classical Greek tradition. And that’s why in the Greek Orthodox Church you will see even the most religious person talking about free will. The free will of the human.

For us, we are fighting for human freedom. And we are facing the Protestant tradition in terms of economics and politics that says first and foremost it’s submission. No. For us, it’s free will. It’s freedom. Freedom to do whatever we like in terms of the person inside a society. That’s the difference between the Greek culture. Even now the European elite call us stubborn, we don’t cooperate with what they say. Their vision of cooperation is the submission of the person to the totality. A totalitarian view of cooperation. No. We say that we can be different. Quite different. For a different road. But we can fight together. That’s how the Greek city-states back in the fourth century BC fought against the Persians. They were fighting each other before, but in the critical moment, the Athenians decided to leave their own city-state in order to go to Salamis to fight effectively against the Persians. And of course, they were fighting for freedom and democracy against Eastern despotism. That’s the whole meaning. And it’s even today. We are very different. We can fight easily each other. Easily. You can see it even in our own close relations. But at the critical moment, we will find a way to unite and fight the common enemy.

And that’s the difficult part also. We’re not soldiers, like the Germans. Following the leader, the Führer. No. We are quite different. You see, our national hero, one our national heroes is Kolokotronis. Kolokotronis is like, I can translate it in English, Kolos is in us, and kotrona is a stone. It means “us, as a stone.” Kolokotronis.

Foundation?

No. Actually, he had a forefather that could jump easily more than 10 meters from a stationary position. And the Albanians, the Turkish Albanians back then said – he was admired by the Albanians, you know, back then, they were very renowned fighters. And the Albanians called him Kolokotronis, he has an “us” out of a stone in order to jump out of a stationary position ten meters away. That’s why he was called Kolokotronis. Kolokotronis said “it’s easy.” He fought for Napoleon and for the English as a mercenary back in the early 19th century. When he was the leader, one of the military leaders of the Greek revolution, he said “It’s easy to lead a European army. It’s easy. You are the general, you have a staff, you deploy your plan, and then you give the orders to your staff, and the commanders and the staff decide what to do next. It’s very difficult to lead a Greek army. Because a Greek army, you have to go out and say good things about someone, say bad things about the other, give presents to the other, and things like that. It’s very difficult. No European can lead a Greek army.” It’s the Greek society, it’s the Greek flavor, it’s the Greek culture. But that’s what we are. That’s our Greek temperament. That what differentiates us from all over Europe and the Balkans. And that’s what we want to keep. If we go back to the 16th century, the 17th century, if you read the Europeans that came here as travelers, you will see the same thing. When they were coming to Ottoman Greece, they were expected to see philosophers discussing philosophy matters and things like that. Instead they met poor people subjected to a very despotic regime, the southern regime. But they liked the term “freedom.” That’s why all over the place, you’ll see easily, you’ll find the names Elefteris and Eleftheria. Elefteris is a very common name, Elefteris means “free,” “freedom.” Eleftheria means “Freedom” in Greek. And you’ll see that all over even in the 16th century. English, Germans, French travelers came here, to Ottoman Greece, from all over the place and heard everywhere people saying to each other “Yasu Elefteris” [Hi Eleftheria]. Elefteris is the Greek name for freedom, or Elefteria – the female name. It’s something, you know, you have to… It goes back centuries. And, we are proud of it, we are not going to get rid of it, and we don’t want to get rid of it, to become a German type of society. And that’s why the human center of civilization started from here, something to do with the climate, and of course, as Hippocrates said back then, “The Greeks are much better fighters than Asians because they are not under a despotic regime.”

It’s the same thing right now. Of course we are trying to keep up because we don’t have a political situation that is free and democratic but it’s inside every Greek. And you want something like that. They didn’t have… We try to fight, our people fought for that kind… it’s easy for the Greeks when they start fighting to find a way to create a democratic situation. It’s easy for us. We did that back in the war. And if you remember the partisans were fighting up in the mountains. And in the villages are the most socially backward socieities, but in these villages a new kind of democracy was created. And it was easy for the most backward village to adapt that type of democracy, a new type. The villagers created their own judges, they created their own political system and they decided themselves what to do. Under an occupation. Even the intelligence secret agents that fought in Greece, who were of course against the Partisans…

The British?

Yes. Mr. Woodhouse. Even he said, in his own book, afterwards, that in a period of three years of fighting over the mountains, the Greeks managed to civilize the most uncivilized place, the mountains in Central Greece, because you know it’s something with the Greek people. It’s the same thing. The difficult thing for us to start, but after that it’s easy. It’s our tradition. It will come up. We will find our way to create the most fantastic and admirable democracy. The only problem is to convince people you have to get rid of the whole regime, not only a party or a government. Otherwise, you will lose and die.

Berlin (AFP) – A wave of right-wing populism has swept across Europe in recent months as the continent struggles with its biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II.

Anti-migrant parties in countries from Hungary to Germany to Slovakia are experiencing a record surge in support.

Here are some of the key players in Europe’s populist movements:

IN POWER

HUNGARY

Viktor Orban’s conservative Fidesz party has seen soaring poll ratings at the expense of the far-right Jobbik, as he took an unapologetically hardline stance in the migrants crisis.

The Hungarian leader has sealed the country’s southern borders with razor wire and fences, refusing to take in a single migrant under a mandatory EU quota scheme. The right-winger has styled himself as the defender of Christian Europe against Muslim hordes.

POLAND

The conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power last October and is deeply opposed to taking in refugees under an EU quota system.

Its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynsk had accused migrants of “bringing in all kinds of parasites which are not dangerous in their own countries, but which could prove dangerous for the local populations” in Europe.

ESTABLISHED

AUSTRIA

The far-right Freedom Party — already the third-largest party in parliament — has topped opinion polls lately, with scores as high as 34 percent.

The nationalist party, which made it into a coalition government under its late leader Joerg Haider in the early 2000s, rails against “asylum cheats”, organises demonstrations against planned centres for refugees and wants Austria’s borders sealed.

DENMARK

The populist Danish People’s Party formed in 1995 achieved a historic high score of 21.1 percent in the June 2015 elections. Although it is not in power, Denmark’s right-wing minority government needs backing from the DPP to pass legislation.

It was behind a controversial measure passed in January allowing Denmark to seize valuables from refugees to pay for their stay.

FRANCE

The far-right National Front (FN) topped the vote in regional polls on December 6, forcing traditional parties to band together to keep them out of power.

Its leader Marine Le Pen has said migration into Europe recalls the “barbarian invasions” of the fourth century.

Opinion polls consistently show that the FN leader would make it to the second round of presidential elections in 2017, regardless of her opponent.

GREECE

The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn captured seats in parliament in 2012 with 6.92 percent of the vote while Greece was in the throes of a sovereign debt crisis. It has orchestrated demonstrations against the opening of refugee shelters, but its popularity has not grown.

NETHERLANDS

The far-right Freedom Party has steadily grown since its establishment a decade ago, stoked by its leader Geert Wilders’ fiery anti-Islam and anti-European Union rhetoric.

While he was the front-runner in political polls on the back of the migrant crisis, Wilders’ popularity has slumped lately ahead of an initial court appearance next week where he faces charges of inciting racial hatred.

SWEDEN

The far-right Sweden Democrats were on the fringes until 2014, when they burst into parliament with 12.9 percent of the vote, becoming the country’s third biggest political force. Opinion polls show them gaining popularity since summer 2015.

NEWCOMERS:

CZECH REPUBLIC

Anti-foreigner party The Dawn, captured eight seats in parliament in 2013. Czech President Milos Zeman, known for his anti-migrant rhetoric, sparked an uproar last year when he appeared on the same stage with Dawn officials.

ESTONIA

The far-right Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) founded in 2012 entered parliament last year with seven seats. It holds torchlight night parades through Tallinn and one of its MPs has openly praised fascism.

GERMANY

The populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded in 2013 on an anti-euro platform, but has since morphed into an anti-migrant party that sparked a storm in January after suggesting police may have to shoot at migrants at the borders.

Its popularity has risen as misgivings grow in Germany over a record influx of refugees. It is eyeing its first seats in three regional parliaments in Sunday’s state elections.

SLOVAKIA

Far-right nationalist party LS-Nase Slovensko made spectacular gains in elections last weekend.

The head of the LS-Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia) party, 38-year-old Marian Kotleba, wants to impose order on the parasites in (Roma) settlements,” to protect residents from “gypsy terror”.

Svoboda, The Right Sector and the Fatherland Party are the most notorious nazis at the moment, being supported by both US and EU.

The Cabinet is not only integrated by the Svoboda and Right Sector (not to mention former members of defunct fascist UNA-UNSO), the two main Neo-Nazi entities have been entrusted with key positions which grant them de facto control over the Armed Forces, Police, Justice and National Security.

While Yatsenuyk’s Fatherland Party controls the majority of portfolios and Svoboda Neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok was not granted a major cabinet post (apparently at the request of assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland), members of Svoboda and the Right Sector occupy key positions in the areas of Defense, Law Enforcement, Education and Economic Affairs.

A migrant child walks from the F.Y.R.O.M’s border into Serbia, near the village of Miratovac. Photograph: Darko Vojinovic/AP

At least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking syndicates.

In the first attempt by law enforcement agencies to quantify one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis, Europol’s chief of staff told the Observer that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.

Brian Donald said 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden. He warned that a sophisticated pan-European “criminal infrastructure” was now targeting refugees. “It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with.”

The plight of unaccompanied child refugees has emerged as one of the most pressing issues in the migrant crisis. Last week it was announced that Britain would accept more unaccompanied minors from Syria and other conflict zones. According to Save the Children, an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied children entered Europe last year. Europol, which has a 900-strong force of intelligence analysts and police liaison officers, believes 27% of the million arrivals in Europe last year were minors.

“Whether they are registered or not, we’re talking about 270,000 children. Not all of those are unaccompanied, but we also have evidence that a large proportion might be,” said Donald, indicating that the 10,000 figure is likely to be a conservative estimate of the actual number of unaccompanied minors who have disappeared since entering Europe.

In October, officials in Trelleborg, southern Sweden, revealed that some 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children who had arrived in the port town over the previous month had gone missing. On Tuesday a separate report, again from Sweden, warned that many unaccompanied refugees vanished and that there was “very little information about what happens after the disappearance”.

In the UK the number of children who disappear soon after arriving as asylum seekers has doubled over the past year, raising fears that they are also being targeted by criminal gangs.

Mariyana Berket, of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said: “Unaccompanied minors from regions of conflict are by far the most vulnerable population; those without parental care that have either been sent by their families to get into Europe first and then get the family over, or have fled with other family members.”

Donald confirmed Europol had received evidence some unaccompanied child refugees in Europe had been sexually exploited. In Germany and Hungary, the former a popular destination country for refugees and migrants, with the latter an important transit state, large numbers of criminals had been caught exploiting migrants, he said. “An entire [criminal] infrastructure has developed over the past 18 months around exploiting the migrant flow. There are prisons in Germany and Hungary where the vast majority of people arrested and placed there are in relation to criminal activity surrounding the migrant crisis,” said Donald.

An entire criminal infrastructure has developed over the past 18 months around exploiting the migrant flow – Brian Donald, Europol chief of staff

In the UK the number of children who disappear soon after arriving as asylum seekers has doubled over the past year, raising fears that they are also being targeted by criminal gangs.

Mariyana Berket, of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said: “Unaccompanied minors from regions of conflict are by far the most vulnerable population; those without parental care that have either been sent by their families to get into Europe first and then get the family over, or have fled with other family members.”

Donald confirmed Europol had received evidence some unaccompanied child refugees in Europe had been sexually exploited. In Germany and Hungary, the former a popular destination country for refugees and migrants, with the latter an important transit state, large numbers of criminals had been caught exploiting migrants, he said. “An entire [criminal] infrastructure has developed over the past 18 months around exploiting the migrant flow. There are prisons in Germany and Hungary where the vast majority of people arrested and placed there are in relation to criminal activity surrounding the migrant crisis,” said Donald.

This article was amended on 11 February 2016 to remove the term “sex work” relating to children. Children caught up in the sex trade are victims of abuse.

The documentary is a good clue of what actually went on when the entire western media kept so quite about the real facts on Ukraine’s “revolution”. I chose to put the word revolution in quotes, because when a small fascist minority together with allied criminal gangs hijack a massive, democratic, uprising through ultra violence and overthrows the government to form a “government”, a regime, of its own liking, it’s called a coup d’etat. It is of course completely coincidental that exactly this development in Ukraine happened to serve US foreign policy and NATO geo-strategic goals extremely well.

An actual revolution, according to the historical, political, social and legal meaning, is when a large portion of the people from different sectors unite and organize, through a democratic resistance struggle and even armed resistance if necessary, in order to overthrow a tyrant regime. The right to self-determination by armed struggle against tyranny is permissible under the UN charter’s article 51, concerning self-defense. But it is very exact on the fact that it only defends democratic, popular uprisings and not coup d’etats. This documentary shines some good lights in the shadows where US’s and NATO’s plans for Russia are laid.

Kosmas Loumakis

The hard-hitting documentary by Paul Moreira “Ukraine, les masques de la révolution” [Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution], released on Monday night by Canal+, created a turmoil both in Ukraine and France well before the premiere. On Sunday the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reported in Facebook that their Ambassador in France had sent an outraged letter to Canal+ where he condemned the documentary as a “a pamphlet at the height of the worst disinformation traditions” “using primitive methods of journalistic manipulation, including the handling of comments of respondents, distorted in translation and facts and purely fabricated images“. The same day Le Monde doubled the pressure on Canal+. Paul Moreira has calmly and respectfully responded to his critics by a detailed post translated into English here. To the credit of Canal Plus’ management, the documentary was screened in time:

French:

Italian:

Dutch:

Please watch it attentively. And let’s try to understand why it has infuriated the official Kiev so much.

The principal danger of Paul Moreira heartbreaking 50-minutes long documentary is that it exposed all critically important lies and silenced facts about “Revolution of Dignity” and its agents in a concentrated form at the established French TV channel.

Paul Moreira did not do anything but showed a simple and honest truth – there was no dignity in that “revolution”. There is no “free civilizational choice” and “independent and legitimate authorities” in today’s Ukraine. There are gangsters licensed to kill and rob, psychopaths and criminals in the “democratic parliament”, parallel Nazi-inspired army, foreign officials who manipulate the political process in a sovereign country, media under total nationalist control etc. His argumentation and picture are so evident, eloquent and bright that there is no reasonable way to refute them. Here is the cause of hysteria and calls to ban (which paradoxically has triggered unprecedented public attention to the movie far beyond France) – they understand that an open and fair discussion would lead further undesirable revelations against the interim rulers in Kiev.

One more pleasant outcome of this story is that the rumors about clinical death of the independent journalism in the West are apparently somewhat exaggerated…

When I started this investigation on Ukraine, I was astonished to discover the degree to which the massacre in Odessa [May 2, 2014] had faded from memory. Forty five people were killed in a huge fire in the heart of a major European city in the middle of the 21stcentury. Everything was filmed by dozens of cameras and cell phones. Yet around me, no one remembered.

Forty five Ukrainians of Russian origin died in a fire inside a building [the Trades Union House in the city center of Odessa] caused by the Molotov cocktails of Ukrainian nationalist militias. After a quick investigation, I discovered that the event had not been censored. It had been addressed, discussed, but never investigated. As though too embarrassing to discuss.

Why no investigation? Probably because the victims were of Russian origin. These victims were reported as “persons” but without knowing who they were, who killed them and why they were dead. “Persons” who were nobodies.

In speaking of these deaths, our democracies should have expressed some sympathy, officially, solemnly. There should have been strong reactions by chancelleries. Press releases by ministries of foreign affairs. [However], following the Russian invasion of Crimea, Russian-speaking populations in the conflict were assigned the roles of villains.

What happened on that May 2, 2014, in Odessa? I discovered the answer after viewing hours of video shootings, interviewing dozens of witnesses, finding victims and aggressors and comparing the stories until I pieced together facts that make sense of this fury. Important fact: I interviewed and have broadcast only direct witnesses of events–the people I saw on videos– in order to filter to some extent the exaggerations and lies that arise in such a circumstance, on the side of the attackers as well as victims. The result of this painstaking work is at the heart of the film to be broadcast Monday evening [February 1] by Canal Plus [Canal +].

During my investigation into this massacre of little exposure, I saw the importance of Ukrainian nationalist militias. They were at the forefront of street fighting on Maidan Square (January-February 2014], and later formed battalions to fight Russian troops in the east of the country. But these battalions were merged into the army. They did not exercise the same discipline. They were able to serve as auxiliaries to the government; or become a parallel police. And, yes, in their ranks, the signs of neo-Nazi ideology were obvious.

My investigation went against the commonly accepted narrative. I knew I was going to meet strong opposition, that we would be accused of playing into the hands of Putin, to voice elements of Russian propaganda. I did not expect to meet with such huge denial, bordering on hysteria at times. On a Ukrainian website, I am called a “terrorist” in the pay of the Russian secret service. The site calls for a ban on the film. Even the Ukrainian ambassador to France pressured Canal Plus [not to screen the film]. That is what surprises me the most. For it seems to me that Ukraine must ask itself about these paramilitary groups. They are, as stated in the film, the greatest threat to Ukrainian democracy. To renounce saying what one knows to be the truth because “it plays into Russian propaganda” is to become a propagandist oneself. One omits, not because we are liars but because we are full of good intentions. But never forget that from such omissions, the worst conspiracy theories are born.

In France, the accusations against the film have come mainly from two militant blogs and an unusually violent writing by the reporter in charge of Ukraine in Le Monde, Benoit Vitkine. In all three publications, the arguments are similar. It is said I did not nuance enough my perception of the extreme right, which ranges from dark brown neo-Nazism to light-beige nationalism. I exaggerated the importance of the paramilitary groups, armed with Kalashnikovs and sometimes with tanks. I have not stressed enough their heroic role in their fight against the Russians. I exaggerated the influence of Americans in the regime change [of February 2014].

And then certain factual errors are pinpointed. I’ll try to answer them here.

To question the rigor of my documentary, Benoit Vitkine cites one, sole example. He accuses me of having created out of my imagination the manufacture of a new generation of tanks by the nationalist battalion Azov (for which he seems to feel a fond indulgence). But it’s the truth. Andriy Biletsky, the head of the battalion, sang to me its praises [manufactured tank] with much pride. 1.2 meters of armored shield in the front and steering video cameras used to steer it. The technical details of this new beast of war can be found here.

Benoit Vitkine is well aware that Andriy Biletsky comes from the most radical extreme right. His electoral standing is low (although he is a Rada deputy), but his standing in steel and in battle-hardened men is strong.

Then Benoit Vitkine insinuates, without citing anything in support, that my purpose is to highlight “the installation of a new fascism in Ukraine”. Vitkine must be very angry to write such things. I never said that fascism had settled in Ukraine. The key phrase of my documentary is: “The Ukrainian revolution has created a monster that will soon turn against its creator.” And then I tell how far-right groups attacked the parliament and killed three policemen in August 2015. I have never suggested that the attackers were in power. Even if those who are in power were able to use them.

The only “good point” which Benoit Vitkine wants to award me is that I worked on the massacre of Odessa, a “frequently overlooked episode”. You said it yourself, dear colleague…

Anna Colin Lebedev writes a blog on Mediapart.fr. She, on the other hand, reproaches me precisely for my treatment of the “drama” of Odessa. She is careful to never write the word “massacre” or “butchery”, to never precisely name the savagery of the murders. Anna Colin Lebedev affirms that this “drama” is not at all ignored. The only proof she offers are papers published … a year after the fact. Those of Le Monde (Benoit Vitkine) and The Economist. A blogger, Olivier Berruyer, conducted an analysis of article headings in the days immediately following the massacre. This analysis is available on his website. It is most eloquent.

Anna Colin Lebedev accuses me of creating a story “centered on the tears of victims”. That’s true, I gave voice to a mother who lost her 17 year old son, Vadim Papura. She spoke reluctantly, she was certain that I would not use her statements, that the West does not care about their fate. I also give voice to Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom even voice remorse. I interviewed eyewitnesses from all sides. According to Anna, everything is the fault of the police, who were not sufficiently effective [in stopping the violence that day]. This is what the film should have focused on, she says. Not on militiamen who threw Molotov cocktails on the trade union building or who finished off the wounded lying on the ground [after jumping from windows to escape the burning building]. Not on the fact that none of the killers has been imprisoned and that the Ukrainian government has sabotaged any judicial inquiry, as recalled in the article in The Economist [May 8, 2014] which she kindly quotes as reference but which she probably has not taken the time to read.

That’s it for the specific criticisms. From there, we descend into tiny details.

Thus, Anna Colin Lebedev tells me that I mention the presence of the symbol of Azov on Maidan while the battalion had yet to be created. It will be formed three months later. Sure, but for me, it was just a name change: the symbol was everywhere on Maidan, it is the same symbol as the group ‘Patriots of Ukraine’, who have the same leader, Biletsky, the same men and who will go on to form a military battalion to fight in Mariupol [Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine].

So for clarity, I made the editorial decision not to go into such levels of detail. The fact that this famous [Azov] symbol is borrowed from an SS division, Das Reich, does not seem to move my critics.

Igor Moysichuk, according to Anna Colin-Lebedev, was not the spokesman for Pravy Sektor [Right Sector] however he was introduced as such in this televised debate. Igor Moysichuk is a member of nationalist splinter groups that sailed between Azov and Pravy Sektor but he was mostly a crook playing for his personal account. He joined the Radical party of Oleg Lyashko and he was arrested, in front of our camera, after extorting 100,000 Hryvnia from some guy from his party.

In the blog Comité Ukraine [Ukraine Committee] by Renaud Rebardy, I am accused of not reporting that the Azov battalion had integrated into the regular army. Renaud Rebardy will have misheard and, especially, misunderstood the nature of relations between the Ukrainian government and Azov. Here is a verbatim commentary from the film when I talk to Azov: “Officially, this brigade obeys the Ukrainian national army. And yet, many of them remain masked.”

And this is what their leader Andriy Biletsky told me about their financial means: “Well, if we talk about finances, for acquiring armaments, it is provided by the state, as is part of our equipment. The rest comes from the work of activists among whom there are small and medium businessmen. They invest money and make all of this possible. ”

During the interview and in comments that I finally edited out, Biletsky utters a veiled threat against the government he deems too corrupt. The subtlety of Azov is that they are officially in the army but they retain a wide margin of autonomy.

Then Renaud Rebardy says that there have “never been talks” to remove Russian as an official language in 13 Ukrainian regions. The facts: the Ukrainian parliament proposed to do so on February 23, 2014, and the day after, the war started. Russian-speaking populations were worried about their future and Putin took advantage of that to launch military manoeuvres. On February 28, the [interim] Ukrainian president repealed the measure. But it was too late, the devil had escaped from the box.

The same Renaud Rebardy chides me for reporting that the new Ukrainian Minister of Finance is a former U.S. diplomat. Natalie Jaresko became a naturalized Ukrainian in December 2014 in order to join the government. Before that, she worked first as a diplomat at the State Department, specializing in Eastern European countries, from 1989 to 1995, and then she maintained a strong relationship with the U.S. government after taking over the presidency of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), an investment fund that invests money from a U.S. state agency (USAID) in the Ukrainian economy. She remained there (in addition to her position at the private investment fund she ran, Horizon Capital) until she took a job in the Ukrainian government [as finance minister]. These are not trivial matters, correct?

Benoit Vitkine accuses me of reporting that the new ministers of the economy are “pro-business”. Yet this is the politics from which they declare themselves “aggressively pro-business,” I have it in my video recordings. This explains, for example, the fourfold increase in natural gas prices. Among other things.

Rebardy also accuses me of being too harsh with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the Svoboda Party. I describe him: “Historically, he belongs to the neo-Nazi movement.” This man has many times said that he wants to rid the country of the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia”; he often uses the term “Yid”. He was also the founder of the Social National Party (does that name remind you of something?).

Another criticism came from the militant Euromaidan blog: I gave voice to Alexis Albu, a communist activist of Odessa whom they accuse of being homophobic and red-brown.

Why did I interview Albu? Not because of his opinions but because I discovered on amateur video his presence in the building of Odessa on the famous May 2, 2014. And let me remind you, my goal was to find people who are seen in videos and then gather their comments on what they saw. I try to establish the facts. What interested me in Albu is that we see him walking out of the union building intact and shortly thereafter, he is laying on the ground, gravely wounded in the head. What happened in between?

Finally Anna Colin Lebedev noted a sentence written in the presentation of the website ofPremières Lignes announcing my documentary: “No one has really asked who they (the Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries) were.” This sentence is obviously factually false. But if she saw the movie and, most of all, listened to it, she knows that this sentence is not in there. It was written to “sell” the film on the website of the production house and can therefore be attributed to clumsy marketing.

All this said, if one sits at the level global public perception, it is clear that the general public knows nothing about the importance of Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups, nor the existence of the massacre of Odessa of May 2, 2014. That`s because this issue has been underreported (which is not to say not reported at all). We know from the Russian side, it is said that far-right nationalists went to fight in the Donbass. But we know less on the other side.

To conclude, I invite everyone to watch the film on Monday night on Canal Plus and make your own judgment. Because the people who insult me and threaten me on social networks are precisely those who have not seen the documentary. They imagined it. Faith is a powerful drug.

You can watch the February 1, 2016 broadcast of ‘Ukraine: The Masks of the Revolution’ on channel ‘Canal Plus’ here(in French, 54 minutes), or click on the screen below. English-language promo and other information on the film is here.

Greek islanders who have been on the frontline of the refugee crisis are to be nominated for the Nobel peace prize with the support of their national government.

Of the 900,000 refugees who entered Europe last year most were received –scared, soaked and travelling in rickety boats – by those who live on the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.

The islanders, including fishermen who gave up their work to rescue people from the sea, are in line to be honoured with one of the world’s most esteemed awards. Eminent academics from the universities of Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Copenhagen are drafting a submission in favour of awarding the prize to the people of Lesbos, Kos, Chíos, Samos, Rhodes and Leros.

The nomination deadline is 1 February, but those behind the plan have already met the Greek minister for migration, Yiannis Mouzalas, who they say has offered his government’s full support. A petition on the website of the grassroots campaign group, Avaaz, in favour of the nomination has amassed 280,000 signatures. According to the petition: “On remote Greek islands, grandmothers have sung terrified little babies to sleep, while teachers, pensioners and students have spent months offering food, shelter, clothing and comfort to refugees who have risked their lives to flee war and terror.”

While the official nomination letter is yet to be finalised, it is understood the academics, whose identities will be revealed in the coming days, will implore the Nobel committee members to accept their nomination.

They will say that it must be noted that a people of a country already dealing with its own economic crisis responded to the unfolding tragedy of the refugee crisis with “empathy and self-sacrifice”, opening their homes to the dispossessed, risking their lives to save others and taking care of the sick and injured.

In December, the image of Antonis Deligiorgis, a 34-year-old Greek army sergeant, rescuing an Eritrean refugee from the turbulent waters off Rhodes, was singled out as a striking illustration of the valour of those in the islands.

click on image to watch video from The Guardian

Only individuals or organisations are eligible to win the prize so it is likely that the “solidarity networks” on the islands – groups of volunteers who organised to help the refugees – or individuals within groups will be the official nominees. A precedent was set in 1976 when Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan won the prize for their efforts in seeking peace in Northern Ireland. It was seen as a reward for all those who sought reconciliation during the most troubled years.

The volunteer networks on the Greek islands have provided accommodation, hygiene packs, food, dry clothes and help with the next steps for refugees. However, it is claimed that the instincts of the majority of islanders set the tone across Europe towards the refugees’ plight.

Spyro Limneos, an activist in Greece for Avaaz who distributed aid on the islands, said: “The people involved in the solidarity networks organised and helped the desperate when the governments weren’t even willing to recognise that the there was a crisis.

“By opening their hearts the islanders sent a powerful message that humanity is above races, above nations.

“I will never forget seeing young girls being rescued from a boat on Leros. They were smiling. They didn’t have suitcases or any possessions except their end-of-year school certificates written in Arabic. They laid those down in the sun to dry out. It was a combination of tragedy and hope.”

One of the organisers of the Solidarity Networks, Matina Katsiveli, 61, a retired judge who lives on Leros, welcomed the move but said there was “reward enough in the smiles of the people we help”.

To mark The Nation’s 150th anniversary, John Nichols was joined in conversation by the eminent radical intellectual Noam Chomsky at the Tucson Festival of Books in Arizona on March 15. Discussing issues ranging from media accountability and voter participation, to money in politics and income inequality, Chomsky offered insight into the greatest challenges of our time.

“The race towards disaster is being carried out with almost euphoric intensity,” said Chomsky. Chomsky maintains that meaningful change requires a democratic awakening. “Democracy is a threat to any power system,” he said.

From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the oil industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world. And this is the story of those who helped shape that world, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself.

Development, Thought and Policy Lecture Series: Austerity and Neoliberalism in Greece, sponsored by the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs (http://www.newschool.edu/public-engag…), at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy (http://www.newschool.edu/milano). GPIA Professors Richard Wolff and Barry Herman share their insights, led by chair and moderator Achilles Kallergie, PhD Candidate in the GPIA program.

What austerity is about is shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another. The mass of Greek people did not force Andreas Papandreou to borrow money. The mass of the Greek people didn’t know about or have much to do with fiscal policy at the national level. In fact, governments, bankers, leading industrialists, ship builders, the major players of the Greek economy, got together, as their counterparts did elsewhere, to produce the decisions that then, in the wake of the international collapse of capitalism, became unsustainable, producing a crisis in Greece. Once that had happened, there was only one question left: Who was going to pay the cost of all the debt Greece has run up or all the production decisions made that have left Greece without the capacity to export, with a dependence on imports etc.? And at that point, as has happened in every country – Greece is in no way unique – the wealthy and the business community went to work, with their resources and their business connections, to make sure that they didn’t pay the price.

Afshin Rattansi goes underground with John Pilger. Award winning journalist and author, John Pilger talks to us about how Washington, London and Paris gave birth to ISIS-Daesh. Plus we examine the media’s role in spreading disinformation ahead of a vote in Parliament for UK bombing of Syria.

Another “master mind” behind a terror attack was killed last week by the police and can thereby not give any alternatives to the official story.

Imperialist reflexes and symptoms of severe megalomania are sadly the western leaders reactions to what more and more looks like yet another False Flag in the New Great Game, the imperialist US/EU grab in Eurasia. ISIS and NATO’s Gladio-strategies seem to be very strongly linked together. Why would the West support these groups some might ask? Apparently, ‘American foreign policy demands demons’ and why does it demand that?

James Corbett, gives a set of very important facts and draw his conclusions based on reason and investigation. In particular if compared with the official narrative.

Kosmas Loumakis

_______________________________________________________________

The Corbett Report is an independent, listener-supported alternative news source. It operates on the principle of open source intelligence and provides podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more. He started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. _______________________________________________________________

“The “Great Game”, the metaphor that is so upsetting to the Western establishment, refers to the struggle for supremacy between the British and the Russians. The Geographical Journal published an article in 1904, that articulated the reason that these great powers were engaged in the struggle for this piece of the globe.”

“The article was called “The Geographical Pivot of History” and was written by Sir Halford John Mackinder PC, the Director of the London School of Economics that was founded by the Fabian Society and folded into the heart of the British establishment in the University of London in 1900. (The cornerstone of the School’s Old Building on Houghton Street was laid by King George V himself). Mackinder is considered the father of the study of geopolitics.

“The Geographical Pivot of History” is the document that is often said to be the founding document of geopolitics and constitutes the first formulation of what would come to be called the “Heartland Theory”. This theory starts from the division of what Mackinder called the “World Island” into inherently divided isolated areas. Each of these areas has its own part to play in the unfolding of world history, with the area he called the “Heartland” of the central Eurasian landmass being the pivot point from which a civilization could derive the geopolitical and economic leverage with which to dominate the world as a whole. This was summarized in a famous dictum from his 1919 work, “Democratic Ideals and Reality”

Looking at the map of what Mackinder had in mind for the Heartland it’s apparent that the “heart” of this Heartland is indeed the Central Asia-Caucasus region. This is what Russia and Britain were so intent on wresting from each other in the 19th century Great Game: control of the region from which the building of a world empire would be possible. And this is why the Project 2049 Institute and others desperately want to downplay this idea. They don’t under any circumstances want anyone to believe that the US and its NATO allies are intent on regional domination or the formation of a world empire.”

“Brzezinski predicted that the first great war of the 21st century would take place in this area of the globe and four years later, in the first year of the 21st century, the United States and its NATO allies invaded Afghanistan beginning an occupation that became the longest military operation in the history of America. Meet the New Great Game, same as the Old Great Game. This time it’s NATO against China, Russia and what might be loosely termed a ‘resistance bloc,’ but the idea is almost the same: dominate Central Asia-Caucasus and use it as pivot point to dominate the world.

The Old and New Great Game are similar in many ways. The Old Great Game sprang from British fears that Russian incursion into Central Asia would threaten to topple their hold over the crown jewel of the British Empire, India; the New Great Game springs from the fear that Russian and/or Chinese dominance over Central Asia and the Caucasus would prevent NATO from achieving its goal of “full spectrum dominance.” The Old Great Game involved the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 and attempt to install a puppet regime; the New Great Game involved the NATO invasion of Afghanistan and attempt to install a puppet regime. The Old Great Gamerelied heavily on espionage, spycraft and subterfuge to undermine Russia’s sway over the Heartland; and as we shall see, the New Great Gamealso heavily relies on covert means to undermine Russian and Chinese influence in the region.”

(This was a few extracts from James Corbetts lecture, “The Secret War: Gladio and the Battle for Eurasia”, which can be watched in its entirety in the video below.)

‘Operation Gladio B’–the continuation of the old NATO Gladio program–covers a tangled web of covert operatives, billionaire Imams, drug running, prison breaks and terror strikes. Its goal: the destabilization of Central Asia and the Caucasus. In this presentation to Studium Generale in Groningen on November 19, 2014, James Corbett lifts the lid on this operation, its covert operatives, and the secret battle for the Eurasian heartland.

Paris Attacks: William Engdahl Explains the Past, Present and Future of the War in Syria

F. William Engdahl of WilliamEngdahl.com joins us today to give his perspective on the Paris attacks. We discuss the historical background to what is taking place now in Syria, how it plays into the current geopolitical agenda of the US/NATO military powers, and what it means for France, Syria and the world moving forward.

As The Corbett Report community continues to track the latest updates on the Paris attack investigation, let us not forget the essential underlying truth: ISIS is a creation of the US, Turkey, Israel and the Gulf States, and they are fostered, funded, equipped, armed, trained by the United States, and its Gulf allies, Turkey and Israel protected by the NATO allies and the GCC, France included.

US ex-intelligence chief on ISIS rise: It was ‘a willful Washington decision’

The US didn’t interfere with the rise of anti-government jihadist groups in Syria that finally degenerated into Islamic State, claims the former head of America’s Defense Intelligence Agency, backing a secret 2012 memo predicting their rise.

An interview with retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), given to Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan, confirms earlier suspicions that Washington was monitoring jihadist groups emerging as opposition in Syria.

About root causes and basic reasons to the refugee crisis and terrorism

Today the entire world is in mourning after the attacks in Paris – Today 60 million human beings are displaced by war and extreme poverty.When exactly does the continuous hypocrisy of the leading western governments become disgusting and extremely offensive? It has to be when their media, and not our ability to think for ourselves, decides what we should get shocked and outraged about and what we should ignore and look away from.

The governments in many European countries are responding to the refugee crisis and the terror attacks as their obvious values and principles suggests, with racist hysteria and policies backed by police and military aggressivity under martial law. The western public opinion must finally dare to dismiss and look beyond the monotonous, hackneyed western tale about evil dictators and terrorists, their local conflicts and the benevolent, “good and helpful” western, democracy-fairies.

One could read in the Independent a month ago: “Refugees have been seeking safe haven in the West for years. Recently, however, something has changed. Thousands have become millions, as nation after nation succumbs to anarchy and fanaticism”.

The basic reasons to why they succumb to fanaticism is really never satisfactory explained, besides the western tale about the cruel, local dictators and fundamentalist terrorists that hates western freedom. Facts are left out of the mainstream reporting: the role of criminal wars, disastrous neoliberal economics, and why mass displacement is a permanent feature under this system. Things are never really explained because in accordance with the western, self-glorifying supremacy dogma, the leading western governments don’t need to explain or admit any real responsibilities to the nations their precursors and themselves have teared apart.

Root causes are hidden within the western supremacy policies

Enforced neoliberal, strategic and economic “development plans” that tie the shattered nations and their people’s hands and feet to these same western governments, has clearly nothing to do with either refugees or global terrorism. Because when the neoliberal economists and ministers have concluded that “there is no alternative”, good people understand that, kneel, suffer and die quietly. Only bad, evil people doesn’t accept and even have the nerves to resist the genocidal conditions and the “necessary human costs” of the western, private bank and cartel labeled “development plans”.

So instead of taking the opportunity to announce real responsibilities, the western leaders talk about French, American and western noble values and principles. As if we are stupid and can’t see for ourselves which distorted and spineless kind of “nobleness” they mean. And how hideously, greedy, racist and hypocritical they practice their alleged values and principles.

History proves that practically ALL ethnic cleansings, genocides, civil wars and wars in the regions that refugees currently flee from, was caused, instigated, provoked and often actually organized by the main European colonial and postcolonial Powers. These western, imperialist geostrategic and geopolitical sentiments, policies and methods has been kept alive and nurtured through “life support” (conservatism, militarism) and in “greenhouses”(secret societies, fascist dictatorships) by old imperialists, royalists and various European and American nationalsocialist and fascist movements.

With the new century and the continuation of the monotonous, neoliberal policies, this has escalated into conditions that I believe we all had hoped to never again experience.

Why is this still happening, you might ask?

Because the warmongering Conservatives, Christian Right and Extreme Right, in the leading European nations, are longing for a “crusade” that they believe would re-establish their colonial control and power. But this time over the entire world. They have emerged through the two World Wars from the rivaling old European Empires & Kingdoms*1 and their financial, clergy and military elite. [*1 – Before 1918 they were named Austro-Hungarian Empire, German Empire, French Republic, Kingdom of Italy, British Empire, USA].

“The European basic values and principles are said to have been inspired and adopted from Greek culture, history, thinking and literature, but European history quite clearly proves that in practice it is the three German Reich’s that has shaped the actual basic values and principles of the European societies. From the ninth century and onward, no other culture has determined the entire continent’s fate as much as those three German dynasties.

Almost all the genocides, civil wars and wars in post-Roman, European history are direct results of the three dynasties that these men established.

Charlemagne or Charles the Great – 9th century – 1st Reich or the “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” lasted ca 800 years

These dynasties escorted and pushed the European folk-spirit into the darkest, most corrupt, perverted “caves” of human thinking and human emotional life. To such extent that its rulers with their cultural-ideological “offspring” could start the Crusades, the Catholic Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, The Balkan Wars and two World Wars. Two world wars that in their actual essence were triggered and launched to prevent any possibility of a feared European peoples rebellion against the Royals, the imperialists, their court’s and “Mammon’s” tyrannic dogmas and doctrines. This is highly relevant to what the current EU and US are triggering again and why.

These old colonial/neoliberal policies, strategies, tactics and methods of the western powers, must finally be fully exposed, debated and perceived by the independent media as the root causes and basic reasons for both terrorism and refugee crises.

Basic reasons

Ever since the term “War on Terror” (WoT) was first used by George W Bush September 20, 2001 we have seen increasing wars, civil wars, massacres, ethnic cleansings and hordes of refugees fleeing from the affected regions. We can all easily conclude that we find ourselves in a far more unstable and dangerous world now than before 9/11, 2001. A long and unsuccessful campaign, allegedly to destroy al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist organizations, has brought the world to the brink of WWIII.

Barack Obama, changed the interpretation and meaning of the term “War on Terror” in 2013 from a general war tactic to a specified and targeted one. He stated, “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘Global War on Terror’, but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America”. After 12 years of general US/NATO/mercenary-terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, Ukraine, Syria and Yemen, after the crude dehumanization and demonization of entire folk groups and social classes and after the attack on western human and civil rights, he doesn’t need to clarify WoT or specify targets. He and the western leaders need to answer humanity on these questions now:

WHO is going to take real responsibility for the dramatic “mistakes” and the clear deliberate crimes of 12 years of US-led, ghost-chasing campaigns, that has left millions of innocent, dead bodies around Asia, the Middle East and Africa?

WHO is going to take real responsibility, for the current ca 7 million refugees from these countries that are fleeing to the west and the 60 million that are displaced?

WHO is going to take real responsibility for the root causes and the basic reasons for terror attacks carried out in Middle Eastern and western cities?

To nuance the self-righteous, western citizen’s exaggerated self-image as a democratic philanthropist a bit, I am pointing out, that the practically unchallenged, but very real, geopolitical and geostrategic goals of Bush’s WoT-campaign and Obama’s interpretation of the same are:

to deduct pipelines, control trade routes and take over the geographical regions between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, because they are rich on natural resources and energy sources.

to clear the area from large populations of its inhabitants for the long planned geostrategic moves of USA, EU, Israel and NATO against Iran, Arab world, Russia and China.

to destroy every labor law that the American and European democratic, solidarity-, liberty-, human rights- and labour-movements have achieved since the end of the nineteenth century. It is about tearing down the workers rights, minimum wages, health care, social insurances, pensions and instead encourage and establish a pure “peon and slave market” to replace the labor markets.

to destroy the last basic democratic principles, constitutions, human rights, international laws, treaties and conventions and instead gradually reform and legislate a totalitarian and ruthless control-state against the people, “to avoid chaos and protect us from terrorists”.

The average European and American citizen meanwhile, have just hovered around “in the blue”, day-dreaming of riches, never-ending pleasures and fame. He have been polishing on his narcissism, his megalomania, his supremacy tale and his racism, while his government is committing criminal act after criminal act against other nations and people’s.

There is no hope for any real positive change, unless the American and European citizens learn to mourn also the others’ innocent dead.

Most people around the world have come to the very logical conclusion, that the countries and governments that are so keen on causing all these problems, due to their neoliberal, geostrategic aims, should also take the main responsibility for the refugees and the root causes behind them. They see, even if they don’t dare to speak out, that USA/EU/NATO measures, policies and actions are state-sanctioned terror against other nations and against its own populations.

The known Wall Street-, White House-, Downing Street- and Brussels/Berlin-cooked, criminal strategies, tactics and methods that the western media defends, justifies, white-washes and cover up, over the last fifteen years are:

false flag operations (blame a spectacular terror act on other than the actual perpetrator, to provoke revolution, civil war or war – usually intelligence-engineered and organized)

financial terrorism (CIA-agents forces neo-colonial “treaties and agreements” on a nation. They offer financial “help” through extortion, imposing debts to takeover physical wealth and natural resources of a nation)

“colour revolutions” (western intelligence services carries out grassroots-takeover actions with NGO-organized fake revolutions, known as colour revolutions, in order to distort and divide any democratic attempts and demads of the people in a nation (Libya, Ukraine and Syria are just few such examples)

covert, regime change operations in sovreign nations

arming and training of dictators, torturers and death squads that carries out mass arrests, interrogations by torture, political assassinations, mass killings and ethnic cleansings

illegal wars (sanctions and invasions of nations based on lies – Iraq, Libya)

proxy wars (military aggression on commission – others than own army are fighting ones war)

soft coups (infiltration and corruption of a whole political elite in a nation, that can lead to democratic meltdown in that nation)

military coups (when geostrategic or geopolitical US policies are unpopular and resisted)

It is disgraceful, that these criminal strategies, tactics and methods, are not perceived as the main root causes and basic reasons behind the current refugee and terror situation.

Now when crocodile tears are shed by our leaders for the refugees and TV-monkeys in reality are dishonoring the terror victims and their families’ mourning, we must dare to really honor both them, as well as any other innocent victims on this planet. We must therefore openly direct questions about the true Basic Reasons and Root Causes, and we must demand real responsibilities for their crimes from our governments.

There is no hope for any real positive change, unless the American and European citizens learn to mourn also the others’ innocent dead, and to condemn also the terror acts of their own leaders.

Kosmas Loumakis

Stockholm 16-11-2015

Except intro-text, epilogue and translation to English, which I added to the original, this is a videoclip from the show on the Greek TV-channel Alfpha, Ελληνοφρένεια 16-11-15

“This short video clip gives a human angle to the hysteria ‘enveloping’ the “Paris Attacks”, and urges the global, Public Opinion to THINK. It breathes decency, reverence and respect for also the others´ grief, pain and suffering. – This is “Ellinofreneia’s” very simple way to display things in its right perspectives – Perpectives that, as opposed to the the current genocidal, warmongering, ARE compatable with a Human Civilization.”

Most reasonable people around the world have come to the very rational and logical conclusion, that the nations and the Governments that are “so keen on” causing all this suffering and deaths – because of their geopolitical and geostrategic urges and goals – should exactly therefore take the main legal, moral, political, economic and social responsibility for the refugees and the ROOT CAUSES behind the phenomnons that create them.

There is truly no hope for any real PEACE, unless the European and American citizens learn to mourn also the others’ innocent dead,… and to be shocked and outraged also by the terror acts of THEIR OWN governments.

UPF’s (EPAM’s) proposal for a stop to the drowning of innocent people

While EU is pretending to address the refugee crisis by summits and by erecting walls, numerous innocent kids and grown-ups drown in the Aegean, in their attempt to live in safety away from wars. At the same time the Greek government sheds crocodile tears, pretending to care. Turkey allows human traffickers to act unhindered, leading to the death of hundreds of refugees.

UPF (EPAM) proposes the following measures to stop refugees’ deaths:

To denounce Turkey’s flagrant collaboration with traffickers and to have sanctions imposed against Turkey, noting that this collaboration goes back several years.

To strictly implement international law and UN conventions for the processing of refugees at countries of entry. This means that refugees are entitled to asylum at the first country of entry. This country is Turkey. Refusal by Turkey to offer asylum to the refugees — as dictated by international treaties and laws — and of appropriate travel documents should result in penalties from the international community.

The Greek government is obliged to defend its sovereignty and to have the exclusive responsibility of directing and handling the crisis placing under its direct control and coordination the actions of volunteers, NGOs, private initiatives and international contributions. The exploitative unaccountable actions of suspect “humanitarian” organizations who victimize innocent refugees to either collect subsidies, or to serve geopolitical interests, has to be stopped.

To denounce or to suspend the Dublin Convention and to deal with the crisis not as an internal EU problem, but as an international one. As a consequence, the responsibility for the solution chosen and the transfer of the people must involve the international community with the responsibility of the United Nations. It is inconceivable that there are states, like the USA, that are involved in the wars that create this unprecedented flow of refugees and immigrants and then wash their hands clean of the blame.

If some of the States-members refuse to accept refugees, then to denounce such acts at the international community and international organizations as being complicit to mass murder, which constitutes a crime against humanity.

Human lives cannot be saved by words and conferences. Only with specific actions we can avoid human deaths.

Introduction: 2015 has become a year of living dangerously. Wars are spreading across the globe. Wars are escalating as new countries are bombed and the old are ravaged with ever greater intensity. Countries, where relatively peaceful changes had taken place through recent elections, are now on the verge of civil wars.

These are wars without victors, but plenty of losers; wars that don’t end; wars where imperial occupations are faced with prolonged resistance.

There are never-ending torrents of war refugees flooding across borders. Desperate people are detained, degraded and criminalized for being the survivors and victims of imperial invasions.

Now major nuclear powers face off in Europe and Asia: NATO versus Russia, US-Japan versus China. Will these streams of blood and wars converge into one radiated wilderness drained of its precious life blood?

Living Dangerously: The Rising Tide of Violent Conflicts

There is no question that wars and military threats have replaced diplomacy, negotiations and democratic elections as the principal means of resolving political conflicts. Throughout the present year (2015) wars have spread across borders and escalated in intensity.

The NATO allies, US, Turkey and the EU have openly attacked Syria with air strikes and ground troops. There are plans to occupy the northern sector of that ravaged country, creating what the Erdogan regime dubs a ‘buffer zone’ cleansed of its people and villages.

Under the pretext of ‘fighting ISIS’, the Turkish government is bombing Kurds (civilians and resistance fighters) and their Syrian allies. On Syria’s southern border, US Special Forces have accelerated and expanded operations from their bases in Jordan on behalf of the mercenary terrorists – funded by the monarchist Gulf States.

Over 4 million Syrians have fled their homes as refugees and over 200,000 have been killed since the US-EU-Turkey-Saudi-sponsored war against the secular Syrian government was launched four years ago.

Dozens of terrorist, mercenary and sectarian groups have carved up Syria into rival fiefdoms, pillaged its economic and cultural resources and reduced the economy by over ninety percent.

The feudal, monarchist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have invaded Yemen with tanks, launching air strikes against a country without any air defenses. Major cities and towns are devastated. Saudi ground troops and armored carriers are killing and wounding thousands – mostly civilians. The brutal Saudi air and sea blockade of Yemen’s ports have led to a humanitarian crisis, as ten million Yemenis face starvation deliberately imposed by a grotesque and obscenely rich monarchy.

The Yemeni resistance fighters, driven out of the major cities, are preparing for prolonged guerrilla warfare against the Saudi monsters and their puppets. Their resistance has already spread across the frontiers of the absolutist Saudi dictatorship.

The brutal Israeli occupation troops, in collaboration with armed ‘settler’ colonists, have accelerated their violent seizure of Palestinian lands. They have stepped up the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Bedouins, Druze and Christian inhabitants replacing their communities with racist ‘Jews-only’ colonial settlements.

Daily assaults against the huge ‘concentration camps’ of Gaza accompany an armed blockade of land, air and water, preventing the reconstruction of the tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospital, factories and infrastructure, destroyed by last year’s Israeli blitzkrieg.

Israel’s continued annexation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territory precludes any diplomatic process; colonial wars have been and continue to be Israel’s policy of choice in dealing with its Arab neighbors and captive populations.

Imperial client Egyptian and Ethiopian dictators rule with iron fists – financed and armed by their EU and US sponsors.

Imperial wars rage throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Hundreds of experienced Baathist Iraqi military officers, who had been expelled or jailed and tortured by the US Occupation army, have now made common cause with Islamist fighters to form ISIS and effectively occupy a third of Iraq and a strategic swath of Syria.

There are daily bombings in Baghdad undermining its US client. Strategic advances by ISIS are forcing the US to resume and escalate its direct combat role

The US-Baghdad retreat and the defeat of the US-trained Iraqi military in the face of the Baathist-Islamist offensive is the opening salvo of a long-term, large-scale war in Iraq and Syria. The Turkish air-war against the Kurds in Iraq will escalate the war in Northern Iraq and extend it into southeast Turkey.

Closer to ‘home’, the EU-US-backed coup (‘regime change’) in Kiev and the attempt to impose dictatorial-pro-West oligarchic rule in Ukraine have detonated a prolonged civil-national war devastating the country and pitting NATO’s proxies against Russian-backed allies in the Donbas.

US, England, Poland and other NATO powers are deeply committed to pushing war right up to Russia’s borders.

There is a new Cold War, with the imposition of wide-ranging US-EU economic sanctions against Russia and the organizing of major NATO military exercises on Russia’s doorsteps. It is no surprise that these provocations are met with a major counter-response – the Russian military build-up. The NATO power grab in Ukraine, which first led to a local ethnic war, now escalates to a global confrontation and may move toward a nuclear confrontation as Russia absorbs hundreds of thousands of refugees from the slaughter in Ukraine.

The US puppet regime in Afghanistan has faced a major advance of the Taliban in all regions, including the capital, Kabul.

The Afghan war is intensifying and the US-backed Kabul regime is in retreat. US troops can scarcely advance beyond their bunkers.

As the Taliban military advances, its leaders demand total surrender of the Kabul puppets and the withdrawal of US troops. The US response will be a prolonged escalation of war.

Pakistan, bristling with US arms, faces a major conflict along its borders with India and permanent war in its semi-autonomous Northwest frontier states with Islamist and ethnic Pashtu guerrilla movements backed by mass regional political parties. These parties exercise de facto control over the Northwest region providing sanctuary and arms for Taliban militants operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Armed ethno-religious conflicts persist in western China, Myanmar and northern India. There are large-scale popular resistance movements in the militant northeast Thailand opposed to the current military-monarchist dictatorship in Bangkok.

In the 21st century, in South and Southeast Asia, as in the rest of the world, war and armed conflicts have become central in resolving ethnic, social, tribal and regional differences with central states: diplomacy and democratic elections have been rendered obsolete and inefficient.

Latin America – On the Verge

Burgeoning violent extra-parliamentary right-wing movements, intent on overthrowing or ‘impeaching’ elected center-left Latin American governments face major confrontations with the state and its mass supporters.

In Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil, US-backed opposition groups are engaged in violent demonstrations, directed toward ousting the elected regimes. In the case of Ecuador, ‘popular sectors’, including some indigenous leaders and sectors of the trade union movement, have called for an ‘uprising’ to oust President Correa. They seem oblivious of the fact that the hard-right oligarchs who now control key offices in the three principal cities (Guayaquil, Quito and Cuenca) will be the real beneficiaries of their ‘uprisings’.

The resurgent Right envisions violent ‘regime change’ as the first step toward ‘wiping the slate clean’ of a decade of social reforms, independent regional organizations and independent foreign policies.

‘Civil war’ may be too strong a word for the situation in Latin America at this time – but this is the direction which the US-backed opposition is heading. Faced with the mess and difficulty of dislodging incumbent regimes via elections, the US and its local proxies have opted for the choreography of street violence, sabotage, martial law and coups – to be followed by sanitized elections – with US-vetted candidates.

War and violence run rampant through Mexico and most of Central America. A US-backed military coup ousted the popularly elected, independent President Zelaya in Honduras. The ensuing US-proxy regime has murdered and jailed hundreds of pro-democracy dissidents and driven thousands to flee the violence.

The 1990’s US-brokered ‘Peace Accords’ in El Salvador and Guatemala effectively blocked any agrarian reform and income redistribution that might have led to the rebuilding of their civil societies. This has led to over two decades of mass disaffection, the rise of armed ‘gangs’ numbering over 100,000 members and an average of six to ten thousand homicides a year with El Salvador becoming the ‘murder capital of the hemisphere’ on a per capita basis. The annual murder toll under the US-brokered ‘Peace Accords’ now exceeds those killed each year during the civil war.

The real ‘carnage capital’ of the hemisphere is Mexico. Over 100,000 people have been murdered during the decade-long, US-backed ‘war on drugs’ – a war which has become a state-sponsored war on the Mexican people.

The internal war has allowed the Mexican government to privatize and sell the crown jewels of the national economy – the petroleum industry. While thousands of Mexicans are terrorized and slaughtered, the US and EU oil companies are curiously shielded from the drug lords. The same Mexican government, its police, officials and military, who collaborate with the drug lords in dividing up the billions of drug dollars, protect foreign oil companies and their executives. After all, narco-dollars are laundered by banks in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and London to help fuel the speculation!

From Regional to Nuclear Wars

Regional and local wars spread under the shadow of a looming world war. The US moves its arms, planes, bases and operations to the Russian and Chinese borders.

Never have so many US troops and war planes been placed in so many strategic locations, often less than an hour drive from major Russian cities.

Not even during the height of the Cold War, did the US impose so many economic sanctions against Russian enterprises.

In Asia, Washington is organizing major trade, military and diplomatic treaties designed to exclude and undermine China’s growth as a trade competitor. It is engaged in provocative activities comparable to the boycott and blockade of Japan which led to the Second World War in Asia.

Open ‘warfare by proxy’ in Ukraine is perhaps the first salvo of the Third World War in Europe. The US-EU-sponsored coup in Kiev has led to the annexation of Western Ukraine. In response to the threat of violence toward the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea and the loss of its strategic naval base on the Black Sea, Russia annexed Crimea.

In the lead-up to the Second World War, Germany annexed Austria. In a similar manner the US-EU installed a puppet regime in Kiev by violent putsch as its own initial steps toward major power grabs in Central Asia. The military build-up includes the placement of major, forward offensive military bases in Poland.

Warsaw’s newly elected hard-right regime of President Andrzej Duda has demanded that Poland become NATO’s central military base of operation and the front line in a war against Russia.

Wars and More Wars and the Never-ending Torrents of Refugees

The US and EU imperial wars have devastated the lives and livelihoods of scores of millions of people in South Asia, North and Sub-Sahara Africa, Central America, Mexico, the Balkans and now Ukraine.

Millions of war refugees escape toward safety in Western Europe, joining the millions of economic refugees who have fled free market destitution in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Balkans and other EU satellites.

Panic among the civilian population of Western Europe sets in as hundreds of thousands cross the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Balkans.

Droves of refugees perish each day. Tens of thousands crowd detention centers. Local labor markets are saturated. Social services are overwhelmed.

The US builds walls and detention camps for the millions trying to escape the harsh consequences of imperial-centered free markets in Mexico, narco-terror and the fraudulent ‘peace accord’-induced violence in Central America.

As Western wars advance, the desperate refugees multiply. The poor and destitute clamber at the gates of the imperial heartland crying: ‘Your bombs and your destruction of our homelands have driven us here, now you must deal with us in your homeland’.

Fomenting class war between the refugees and ‘natives’ of the imperial West – may not be on the agenda . . . for now, but the future for ‘civil’ society in Europe and the US is bleak.

Meanwhile, more and even bigger wars are on the horizon and additional millions of civilians will be uprooted and face the choice of starving, fleeing with their families or fighting the empire. The ranks of seasoned and infuriated resistance fighters are swelling in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and elsewhere.

The US and EU are becoming armed fortresses. US police deal with the marginalized citizenry as an occupying army, assaulting African-Americans, immigrants and dissidents – while looting poor communities . . . and protecting the rich…

Conclusion

War is everywhere and expanding: No continent or region, big or small, is free from the contagion of war.

Imperial wars have spawn local wars . . . igniting mass flights in a never-ending cycle. There are no real diplomatic success stories! There are no enduring, viable peace accords!

Some pundits may protest this analysis: They point to the recent US – Cuba rapprochement as a ‘success’. They conveniently forget that the US is still subverting Cuba’s biggest trading partner, Venezuela; that Washington’s major regional proxies are demanding regime change among Cuba’s allies in Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia and that Washington is increasingly threatening Cuba’s alternative markets in Russia and China. The vision of the US flag flapping in the breeze outside its embassy in Havana does little to cover Washington’s iron fist threatening Cuba’s allies.

Others cite the US – Iran peace accord as a major ‘success’. They ignore that the US is backing the bloody Saudi invasion of neighboring Yemen and the massacre of Shiite communities; that the US has provided Israel with a road map detailing Iran’s entire defense system and that the US and EU are bombing Iran’s Syrian ally without mercy.

As for the US – Cuba and Iranian agreements– are they enduring and strategic or just tactical imperial moves preparing for even greater assaults?

The war epidemic is not receding.

War refugees are still fleeing; they have no homes or communities left.

Disorder and destruction are increasing, not decreasing; there is no rebuilding the shattered societies, not in Gaza, not in Fallujah, not in the Donbas, not in Guerrero, not in Aleppo.

Europe feels the tremors of a major conflagration.

Americans still believe that the two oceans will protect them. They are told that placing NATO missiles on Russia’s borders and stationing warships off China’s shores and building electrified walls and laying barbed wire along the Rio Grande will protect them. Such is their faith in their political leaders and propagandists.

What a packet of lies! Inter-continental missiles can ‘rain down’ on New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

It is time to wake up!

It is time to stop the US – EU headlong race to World War III!

Where to start? Libya has been irrevocably destroyed; it is too late there! Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are aflame. We are being plunged deeper into war while being told we are withdrawing! Ukraine sucks in more guns and more troops!

Can we really have peace with Iran if we cannot control our own government as it dances to the Israelis tune? And Israel insists on war – our waging war for them! As the Israeli war criminal General and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once told some worried American Zionists: “Trouble with the US? We lead them by the nose . . . !”

Just look at the terrified families fleeing carnage in the Middle East or Mexico.

What is to be done?

When will we cut our losses and shake off the bonds of these war makers – foreign and domestic?

Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics of Nehru University, discusses the economic history of Germany’s debt relief in both 1930s and 1950s and why policies of growth rather than austerity led them to become an economic powerhouse

Introduction: The Greek people’s efforts to end the economic depression, recover their sovereignty and reverse the regressive socio-economic policies, which have drastically reduced living standards, have been thrice denied.

First, the denial came as tragedy: When the Greek majority elected Syriza to government and their debts increased, the economy plunged further into depression and unemployment and poverty soared. The Greek people voted for Syriza believing its promises of ‘a new course’. Immediately following their victory, Syriza reneged on their promise to restore sovereignty – and end the subjugation of the Greek people to the economic dictates of overseas bankers, bureaucrats and political oligarchs. Instead Syriza kept Greece in the oligarchical imperialist bloc, portraying the European Union as an association of independent sovereign countries. What began as a great victory of the Greek people turned into a tragic strategic retreat. >From their first day in office, Syriza led the Greek people down the blind alley of total submission to the German empire.

Then the tragedy turned into farce when the Greek people refused to acknowledge the impending betrayal by their elected leaders. They were stunned, but mute, as Syriza emptied the Greek treasury and offered even greater concessions, including acceptance of the illegal and odious debts incurred by private bankers, speculators and political kleptocrats in previous regimes.

True to their own vocation as imperial overlords, the EU bosses saw the gross servility of Syriza as an invitation to demand more concessions – total surrender to perpetual debt peonage and mass impoverishment. Syriza’s demagogic leaders, Yanis Varoufakis and Alexis Tsipras, shifting from fits of hysteria to infantile egotism, denounced ‘the Germans and their blackmail’ and then performed a coy belly-crawl at the feet of the ‘Troika’, peddling their capitulation to the bankers as ‘negotiations’ and referring to their overlords as . . . ‘partners’.

Syriza, in office for only 5 months brought Greece to the edge of total bankruptcy and surrender, then launched the ‘mother of all deceptions’ on the Greek people: Tsipras convoked a ‘referendum’ on whether Greece should reject or accept further dictates and cuts to bare bones destitution. Over 60% of the Greek people voted a resounding NO to further plunder and poverty.

In Orwellian fashion, the megalomaniac Tsipras immediately re-interpreted the ‘NO’vote as a mandate to capitulation to the imperial powers, accepting the EU bankers’ direct supervision of the regime’s implementation of Troika’s policies – including drastic reductions of Greek pensions, doubling the regressive ‘VAT’ consumption tax on vital necessities and a speed-up of evictions of storeowners and householders behind in their mortgage payments. Thus Greece became a vassal state: Nineteenth century colonialism was re-imposed in the 21st century.

Colonialism by Invitation

Greek politicians, whether Conservative or Socialist, have openly sought to join the German-led imperial bloc known as the European Union, even when it was obvious that the Greek economy and financial system was vulnerable to domination by the powerful German ruling class.

From the beginning, the Greek Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) and their Conservative counterparts refused to recognize the class basis of the European Union. Both political factions and the Greek economic elites, that is, the kleptocrats who governed and the oligarchs who ruled, viewed entry into the EU as an opportunity for taking and faking loans, borrowing, defaulting and passing their enormous debts on to the public treasury!

Widely circulating notions among the Left that ‘Germany is responsible’ for the Greek crisis are only half true, while the accusations among rightwing financial scribes that the ‘Greek people are spendthrifts’ who brought on their own crisis is equally one-sided. The reality is more complex:

The crash and collapse of the Greek economy was a product of an entrenched parasitic rentier ruling class –both Socialist and Conservative – which thrived on borrowing at high interest rates and speculating in non-productive economic activities while imposing an astronomical military budget. They engaged in fraudulent overseas financial transactions while grossly manipulating and fabricating financial data to cover-up Greece’s unsustainable trade and budget deficits.

German and other EU exporters had penetrated and dominated the Greek markets. The bankers charged exorbitant interest rates while investors exploited cheap Greek labor. The creditors ignored the obvious risks because Greek rulers were their willing accomplices in the ongoing pillage.

Clearly entry into and continued membership in the EU has largely benefited two groups of elites: the German rulers and the Greek rentiers: The latter received short-term financial grants and transfers while the former gained powerful levers over the banks, markets and, most important, established cultural-ideological hegemony over the Greek political class. The Greek elite and middle class believed ‘they were Europeans’ – that the EU was a beneficent arrangement and a source of prosperity and upward mobility. In reality, Greek leaders were merely accomplices to the German conquest of Greece. And the major part of the middle class aped the views of the Greek elite.

The financial crash of 2008-2009 ended the illusions for some but not most Greeks. After 6 years of pain and suffering a new version of the old political class came to power: Syriza! Syriza brought in new faces and rhetoric but operated with the same blind commitment to the EU. The Syriza leadership believed they were “partners”.

The road to vassalage is rooted deep in the psyche of the political class. Instead of recognizing their subordinate membership in the EU as the root cause of their crisis, they blamed ‘the Germans, the bankers, Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schnauble , the IMF, the Troika… The Greek rulers and middle class were in fact both victims and accomplices.

The German imperial regime loaned money from the tax revenues of German workers to enable their complicit Greek vassals to pay back the German bankers… German workers complained. The German media deflected criticism by blaming the ‘lazy Greek cheats’. Meanwhile, the Greek oligarch-controlled media deflected criticism of the role of the parasitical political class back to the ‘Germans’. This all served to obscure the class dynamics of empire building — colonialism by invitation. The ideology of blaming peoples, instead of classes, is pitting German workers against Greek employees and pensioners. The German masses support their bankers, while the Greek masses have elected and followed Syriza – their traitors.

From Andreas Papandreou to Alexis Tsipras: Misconceptions about the European Union

After Syriza was elected a small army of instant experts, mostly leftist academics from Canada, the US and Europe, sprang up to write and speak, usually with more heat than light, on current Greek political and economic developments. Most have little knowledge or experience of Greek politics, particularly its history and relations with the EU over the past thirty five years.

The most important policy decisions shaping the current Syriza government’s betrayal of Greek sovereignty go back to the early 1980’s when I was working as an adviser to PASOK Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. At that time, I was party to an internal debate of whether to continue within the EU or leave. Papandreou was elected on an anti EU, anti NATO platform, which, like Tsipras, he promptly reneged on– arguing that ‘there were no alternatives’. Even then, there were international and Greek academic sycophants, as there are today, who argued that membership in the EU was the only realistic alternative- it was the ‘only possibility’. The ‘possibilistas” at that time, operating either from ignorance or deceit, were full of bluster and presumption. They denied the underlying power realities in the structure of the EU and dismissed the class capacity of the working and popular masses to forge an alternative. Then, as now, it was possible to develop independent alternative relations with Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East and North Africa. The advantages of maintaining a protected market, a robust tourist sector and an independent monetary system were evident and did not require EU membership (or vassalage).

Above all, what stood out in both leaders, Andreas Papandreou and Alexis Tsipras, was their profound misconception of the class nature of the dominant forces in the EU. In the 1980’s Germany was just beginning to recover its imperial reach. By the time Syriza-Tsipras rose to power (January 2015), Germany’s imperial power was undeniable. Tsipras’ misunderstanding of this reality can be attributed to his and his ‘comrades’ rejection of class and imperial analyses. Even academic Marxists, who spouted Marxist theory, never applied their abstract critiques of capitalism and imperialism to the concrete realities of German empire building and Greece’s quasi-colonial position within the EU. They viewed their role as that of ‘colonial reformers’ –imagining that they were clever enough to ‘negotiate’ better terms in the German-centered EU. They inevitably failed because Berlin had a built-in majority among its fervently neo-liberal ex-communist satellites plus the IMF, French and English imperial partners. Syriza was no match for this power configuration. Then there was the bizarre delusion among the Syriza intellectuals that European capitalism was more benign than the US version.

EU membership has created scaffolding for German empire-building. The take off point was West Germany’s annexation of East Germany. This was soon followed by the incorporation of the rightwing regimes in the Baltic and Balkans as subordinate members of the EU – their public assets were snapped up by Germany corporations at bargain prices. The third step was the systematic break-up of Yugoslavia and the incorporation of Slovenia into the German orbit. The fourth step was the takeover of key sectors of the Polish and Czech economies and the exploitation of cheap skilled labor from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and other satellite states.

Without firing a shot, German empire-building has revolved around making loans and financial transfers to the new subordinate member states in the EU. These financial transactions were predicated upon the following conditions: 1) Privatization and sale of the new member states’ prized public assets to mainly German as well as other EU investors and 2) Forcing member states to dismantle their social programs, approve massive lay-offs and meet impossible fiscal targets. In other words, expansion of the contemporary German empire required austerity measures, which transformed the ex-communist countries into satellites, vassals and sources of mercenaries – a pattern which is now playing out in Greece.

The reason these new German ‘colonies’ (especially Poland and the Baltic States) insist on the EU imposing harsh austerity measures on Greece, is that they went through the same brutal process convincing their own beleaguered citizens that there was no alternative – resistance was futile. Any successful demonstration by Greek workers, farmers and employees that resistance to empire was possible would expose the corrupt relationship between these client leaders and the German imperial order. In order to preserve the foundations of the new imperial order, Germany has had to take a hardline on Greece. Otherwise the recently incorporated colonial subjects in the Baltic, Balkan and Central Europe states might “re-think” the brutal terms of their own incorporation to the European Union. This explains the openly punitive approach to Greece – turning it into the ‘Haiti of Europe’ analogous to the US’ long standing brutalization of the rebellious Haitians – as an object lesson to its own Caribbean and Latin American clients.

The root cause of German intransigence has nothing to do with the political personalities or quirks of Angela Merkle and Wolfgang Schnauble: Such imperial leaders do not operate out of neurotic vindictiveness. Their demand for total Greek submission is an imperative of German empire-building, a continuation of the step-by-step conquest of Europe.

German empire-building emphasizes economic conquests, which go hand-in-hand with US empire-building based on military conquests. The same economic satellites of Germany also serve as sites for US military bases and exercises encircling Russia; these vassal states provide mercenary soldiers for US imperial wars in South Asia, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

Syriza’s economic surrender is matched by its spineless sell-out to NATO, its support of sanctions against Russia and its embrace of US policies toward Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Germany and its imperial partners have launched a savage attack on the working people of Greece, usurping Greek sovereignty and planning to seize 50 billion Euros of vital Greek public enterprises, land and resources. This alone should dispels the myth, promoted especially by the French social democratic demagogue Jacques Delores, that European capitalism is a benign form of ‘social welfarism’ and an ‘alternative’ to the savage Anglo-American version capitalism.

What has been crucial to previous and current versions of empire-building is the role of a political collaborator class facilitating the transition to colonialism. Here is where social democrats, like Alexis Tsipras, who excel in the art of talking left while embracing the right, flatter and deceive the masses into deepening austerity and pillage.

Instead of identifying the class enemies within the EU and organizing an alternative working class program, Tsipras and his fellow collaborators pose as EU ‘partners’ , fostering class collaboration – better to serve imperial Europe: When the German capitalists demanded their interest payments, Tsipras bled the Greek economy. When German capitalists sought to dominate Greek markets, Tsipras and Syriza opened the door by keeping Greece in the EU. When German capital wanted to supervise the take-over of Greek properties, Tsipras and Syriza embraced the sell-off.

There is clear class collaboration within the Greek elite in the destruction of nation’s sovereignty: Greek banker oligarchs and sectors of the commercial and tourist elite have acted as intermediaries of the German empire builders and they personally benefit from the German and EU takeover despite the destitution of the Greek public. Such economic intermediaries, representing 25% of the electorate, have become the main political supporters of the Syriza-Tsipras betrayal. They join with the EU elite applauding Tsipras’ purge of left critics and his authoritarian seizure of legislative and executive power! This collaborator class will never suffer from pension cuts, layoffs and unemployment. They will never have to line up at crippled banks for a humiliating dole of 65 Euros of pension money. These collaborators have hundreds of thousands and millions stashed in overseas bank accounts and invested in overseas real estate. Unlike the Greek masses, they are ‘European’ first and foremost – willing accomplices of German empire builders!

Tragic Beginnings: The Greek People Elect a Trojan Horse

Syriza is deeply rooted in Greek political culture .A leadership of educated mascots serving overseas European empire-builders. Syriza is supported by academic leftists who are remote from the struggles, sacrifices and suffering of the Greek masses. Syriza’s leadership emerged on the scene as ideological mentors and saviors with heady ideas and shaky hands. They joined forces with downwardly mobile middle class radicals who aspired to rise again via the traditional method: radical rhetoric, election to office, negotiations and transactions with the local and foreign elite and betrayal of their voters. Theirs is a familiar political road to power, privilege and prestige. In this regard, Tsipras personifies an entire generation of upwardly mobile opportunists, willing and able to sellout Greece and its people. He perpetuates the worst political traditions: In campaigns he promoted consumerism over class consciousness (discarding any mobilization of the masses upon election!). He is a useful fool, embedded in a culture of clientelism, kleptocracy, tax evasion, predatory lenders and spenders – the very reason his German overlords tolerated him and Syriza, although on a short leash!

Tsipras’ Syriza has absolute contempt for democracy. He embraces the ‘Caudillo Principle’: one man, one leader, one policy! Any dissenters invite dismissal!

Syriza has utterly submitted to imperial institutions, the Troika and their dictates, NATO and above all the EU, the Eurozone. Tsipras/ Syriza reject outright independence and freedom from imperial dictates. In his ‘capitulation to the Germans’ Tsipra engaged in histrionic theatrics, but by his own personal dictate, the massive ‘NO to EU’ vote was transformed into a YES.

The cruelest political crime of all has been Tsipras running down the Greek economy, bleeding the banks, emptying the pension funds and freezing everyday salaries while ‘blaming the bankers’, in order to force the mass of Greeks to accept the savage dictates of his imperial overlords or face utter destitution!

The Ultimate Surrender

Tsipras and his sycophants in Syriza, while constantly decrying Greece’s subordination to the EU empire-builders and claiming victimhood, managed to undermine the Greek people’s national consciousness in less than 6 months. What had been a victorious referendum and expression of rejection by three-fifths of the Greek voters turned into a prelude to a farcical surrender by empire collaborators. The people’s victory in the referendum was twisted to represent popular support for a Caudillo. While pretending to consult the Greek electorate, Tsipras manipulated the popular will into a mandate for his regime to push Greece beyond debt peonage and into colonial vassalage.

Tsipras is a supreme representation of Adorno’s authoritarian personality: On his knees to those above him, while at the throat of those below.

Once he has completed his task of dividing, demoralizing and impoverishing the Greek majority, the local and overseas ruling elites will discard him like a used condom, and he will pass into history as a virtuoso in deceiving and betraying the Greek people.

Epilogue:

Syriza’s embrace of hard-right foreign policies should not be seen as the ‘result of outside pressure’, as its phony left supporters have argued, but rather a deliberate choice. So far, the best example of the Syriza regime’s reactionary policies is its signing of a military agreement with Israel.

According to the Jerusalem Post (July 19, 2015), the Greek Defense Minister signed a mutual defense and training agreement with Israel, which included joint military exercises. Syriza has even backed Israel’s belligerent position against the Islamic Republic of Iran, endorsing Tel Aviv’s ridiculous claim that Teheran represents a terrorist threat in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Syriza and Israel have inked a mutual military support pact that exceeds any other EU member agreement with Israel and is only matched in belligerence by Washington’s special arrangements with the Zionist regime.

Israel’s ultra-militarist ‘Defense’ Minister Moshe Yaalon, (the Butcher of Gaza), hailed the agreement and thanked the Syriza regime for ‘its support’. It is more than likely that Syriza’s support for the Jewish state explains its popularity with Anglo-American and Canadian ‘left’ Zionists…

Syriza’s strategic ties with Israel are not the result of EU ‘pressure’ or the dictates of the ‘Troika’. The agreement is a radical reversal of over a half-century of Greek support for the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people against the Israeli terrorist state. This military pact, like the Syriza regime’s economic capitulation to the German ruling class, is deeply rooted in the ‘colonial ideology’, which permeates Tsipras’ policies. He has taken Greece a significant step ‘forward’ from economic vassal to a mercenary client of the most retrograde regime in the Mediterranean.

According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.

Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers. If you remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed securities” at a huge profit to various financial entities in countries around the world.

A big enabler of this criminal activity was another branch of the banking system, the group of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such as Tony Blair got paid by Big Banks to peddle these dangerous securities to pension funds and municipalities and countries around Europe. Banks and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.

But this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. There was much more profit to be made in the next three stages!

Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!

Vultures like Goldman Sachs and other big banks profited enormously in three ways: one, they could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual for pennies on the dollar. Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and insiders such as John Paulson (who recently donated $400 million to Harvard) had made bets that these securities would blow up. Paulson made billions, and the media celebrated his acumen. (For an analogy, imagine the terrorists betting on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub salt in the wound, the big banks demanded a bailout from the very citizens whose lives the bankers had ruined! Bankers have chutzpah. In the U.S., they got hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayers and trillions from the Federal Reserve Bank which is nothing but a front group for the bankers.

In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let that sink in for a moment – the supposedly irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers.

Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have unique strategies to weaken the immune system of the host. One of the proven techniques used by the parasitic international bankers is to downgrade the bonds of a country. And that’s exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end of 2009. This immediately makes the interest rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it more and more expensive for the country to borrow money or even just roll over the existing bonds.

The banks also control the politics of nations. In 2011, when the Greek prime minister refused to accept a second massive bailout, the banks forced him out of the office and immediately replaced him with the Vice President of ECB (European Central Bank)! No elections needed. Screw democracy. And what would this new guy do? Sign on the dotted line of every paperwork that the bankers bring in.

(By the way, the very next day, the exact same thing happened in Italy where the Prime Minister resigned, only to be replaced by a banker/economist puppet. Ten days later, Spain had a premature election where a banker puppet won the election).

The puppet masters had the best month ever in November 2011.

Few months later, in 2012, the exact bond market manipulation was used when the banksters turned up the Greek bonds’ yields to 50%!!! This financial terrorism immediately had the desired effect: The Greek parliament agreed to a second massive bailout, even larger than the first one.

Now, here is another fact that most people don’t understand. The loans are not just simple loans like you would get from a credit card or a bank. These are loans come with very special strings attached that demand privatization of a country’s assets. If you have seen Godfather III, you would remember Hyman Roth, the investor who was carving up Cuba among his friends. Replace Hyman Roth with Goldman Sachs or IMF (International Monetary Fund) or ECB, and you get the picture.

Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.” For the debt that was forced upon it, Greece had to sell many of its profitable assets to oligarchs and international corporations. And privatizations are ruthless, involving everything and anything that is profitable. In Greece, privatization included water, electricity, post offices, airport services, national banks, telecommunication, port authorities (which is huge in a country that is a world leader in shipping) etc. Of course, the ever-manipulative bankers always demand immediate privatization of all media which means that the country gets photogenic TV anchors who spew establishment propaganda every day and tell the people that crooked and greedy banksters are saviors; and slavery under austerity is so much better than the alternative.

In addition to that, the banker tyrants also get to dictate every single line item in the government’s budget. Want to cut military spending? NO! Want to raise tax on the oligarchs or big corporations? NO! Such micro-management is non-existent in any other creditor-debtor relationship.

So what happens after privatization and despotism under bankers? Of course, the government’s revenue goes down and the debt increases further. How do you “fix” that? Of course, cut spending! Lay off public workers, cut minimum wage, cut pensions (same as our social security), cut public services, and raise taxes on things that would affect the 99% but not the 1%. For example, pension has been cut in half and sales tax increase to more than 20%. All these measures have resulted in Greece going through a financial calamity that is worse than the Great Depression of the U.S. in the 1930s.

After all this, what is the solution proposed by the heartless bankers? Higher taxes! More cuts to the pension! It takes a special kind of a psychopath to put a country through austerity, an economic holocaust.

If every Greek person had known the truth about austerity, they wouldn’t have fallen for this. Same goes for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and other countries going through austerity. The sad aspect of all this is that these are not unique strategies. Since World War II, these predatory practices have been used countless times by the IMF and the World Bank in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

This is the essence of the New World Order — a world owned by a handful of corporations and banks; a world that is full of obedient, powerless debt serfs.

So, it’s time for the proud people of Greece to rise up like Zeus and say NO (“OXI” in Greece) to the greedy puppet masters, unpatriotic oligarchs, parasitic bankers and corrupt politicians.

Dear Greece, know that the world is praying for you and rooting for you. This weekend, vote NO to austerity. Say YES to freedom, independence, self-government, sovereignty, and democracy. Go to the polls this weekend and give a resounding, clear victory for the 99% in Greece, Europe, and the entire western world.

The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in the United States as “civil asset forfeiture,” which has permitted American police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property. They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools, libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges, public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know the financial elites’ hijacking of democratic institutions to impose widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what it is to be abandoned.

The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism, manipulating the world’s most powerful financial institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken, regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are privatized. Secret trade agreements—which even elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil. By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its wake.

The Greek government kneels before the bankers of Europe begging for mercy because it knows that if it leaves the eurozone, the international banking system will do to Greece what it did to the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973 in Chile; it will, as Richard Nixon promised to do in Chile, “make the economy scream.” The bankers will destroy Greece. If this means the Greeks can no longer get medicine—Greece owes European drug makers 1 billion euros—so be it. If this means food shortages—Greece imports thousands of tons of food from Europe a year—so be it. If this means oil and gas shortages—Greece imports 99 percent of its oil and gas—so be it. The bankers will carry out economic warfare until the current Greek government is ousted and corporate political puppets are back in control.

Human life is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for the profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. It was, after all, Goldman Sachs—which shoved subprime mortgages down the throats of families it knew could never pay the loans back, sold the subprime mortgages as investments to pension funds and then bet against them—that orchestrated complex financial agreements with Greece, many of them secret. These agreements doubled the debt Greece owes under derivative deals and allowed the old Greek government to mask its real debt to keep borrowing. And when Greece imploded, Goldman Sachs headed out the door with suitcases full of cash.

The system of unfettered capitalism is designed to callously extract money from the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites. This is seen in the mounting fines and fees used to cover shortfalls in city and state budgets. Corporate capitalism seeks to privatize all aspects of government service, from education to intelligence gathering. The U.S. Postal Service appears to be next. Parents already must pay hundreds of dollars for their public-school children to take school buses, go to music or art classes and participate in sports or other activities. Fire departments, ambulance services, the national parks system are all slated to become fodder for corporate profit. It is the death of the civil society.

Criminal justice is primarily about revenue streams for city and state governments in the United States rather than about justice or rehabilitation. The poor are arrested and fined for minor infractions in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere; for not mowing their lawns; for putting their feet on seats of New York City subway cars. If they cannot pay the fines, as many cannot, they go to jail. In jail they are often charged room and board. And if they can’t pay this new bill they go to jail again. It is a game of circular and never-ending extortion of the poor. Fines that are unpaid accrue interest and generate warrants for arrest. Poor people often end up owing thousands of dollars for parking or traffic violations.

Fascist and communist firing squads sometimes charged the victim’s family for the bullets used in the execution. In corporate capitalism, too, the abusers extract payment; often the money goes to private corporations that carry out probation services or prison and jail administration. The cost of being shot with a stun gun ($26) or of probation services ($35 to $100 a month) or of an electronic ankle bracelet ($11 a month) is vacuumed out of the pockets of the poor. And all this is happening in what will one day be seen as the good times. Wait until the financial house of cards collapses again—what is happening in China is not a good sign—and Wall Street runs for cover. Then America will become Greece on steroids.

“We are a nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system,” write Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr in an Institute for Policy Studies report titled “The Poor Get Prison.” “We criminalize life-sustaining activities of people too poor to afford shelter. We incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. And we institute policies that virtually bar them for life from participating in society once they have done their time. We have allowed the resurgence of debtors’ prisons. We’ve created a second-tier public education system for poor children and black and Latino children that disproportionally criminalizes their behavior and sets them early onto the path of incarceration and lack of access to assistance and opportunity.”

The corporate dismantling of civil society is nearly complete in Greece. It is far advanced in the United States. We, like the Greeks, are undergoing a political war waged by the world’s oligarchs. No one elected them. They ignore public opinion. And, as in Greece, if a government defies the international banking community it is targeted for execution. The banks do not play by the rules of democracy.

Our politicians are corporate employees. And if you get dewy-eyed about the possibility of the U.S. having its first woman president, remember that it was Hillary Clinton’s husband who decimated manufacturing jobs with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and then went on to destroy welfare with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which halted federal cash aid programs and imposed time-limited, restrictive state block grants. Under President Bill Clinton, most welfare recipients—and 70 percent of those recipients were children—were dropped from the rolls. The prison-industrial complex exploded in size as its private corporations swallowed up surplus, unemployed labor, making $40,000 or more a year from each person held in a cage. The population of federal and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 under Clinton. He, along with Ronald Reagan, set the foundations for the Greecification of the United States.

The destruction of Greece, like the destruction of America, by the big banks and financial firms is not, as the bankers claim, about austerity or imposing rational expenditures or balanced budgets. It is not about responsible or good government. It is a vicious form of class warfare. It is profoundly anti-democratic. It is about forming nations of impoverished, disempowered serfs and a rapacious elite of all-powerful corporate oligarchs, backed by the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history and a militarized police that shoots unarmed citizens with reckless abandon. The laws and rules it imposes on the poor are, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, little more than “organized sadism.”

Corporate profit is God. It does not matter who suffers. In Greece 40 percent of children live in poverty, there is a 25 percent unemployment rate and the unemployment figure for those between the ages of 15 and 24 is nearly 50 percent. And it will only get worse.

The economic and political ideology that convinced us that organized human behavior should be determined by the dictates of the global marketplace was a con game. We were the suckers. The promised prosperity from trickle-down economics and the free market instead concentrated wealth among a few and destroyed the working and the middle classes along with all vestiges of democracy. Corrupt governments, ignoring the common good and the consent of the governed, abetted this pillage. The fossil fuel industry was licensed to ravage the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species, while being handed lavish government subsidies. None of this makes sense.

The mandarins that maintain this system cannot respond rationally in our time of crisis. They are trained only to make the system of exploitation work. They are blinded by their insatiable greed and neoliberal ideology, which posits that controlling inflation, privatizing public assets and removing trade barriers are the sole economic priorities. They are steering us over a cliff.

We will not return to a rational economy or restore democracy until these global speculators are stripped of power. This will happen only if the streets of major cities in Europe and the United States are convulsed with mass protests. The tyranny of these financial elites knows no limits. They will impose ever greater suffering and repression until we submit or revolt. I prefer the latter. But we don’t have much time.

Development, Thought and Policy Lecture Series: Austerity and Neoliberalism in Greece, sponsored by the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs (http://www.newschool.edu/public-engag…), at the Milano School for International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy (http://www.newschool.edu/milano). GPIA Professors Richard Wolff and Barry Herman share their insights, led by chair and moderator Achilles Kallergie, PhD Candidate in the GPIA program.

What austerity is about is shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another. The mass of Greek people did not force Andreas Papandreou to borrow money. The mass of the Greek people didn’t know about or have much to do with fiscal policy at the national level. In fact, governments, bankers, leading industrialists, ship builders, the major players of the Greek economy, got together, as their counterparts did elsewhere, to produce the decisions that then, in the wake of the international collapse of capitalism, became unsustainable, producing a crisis in Greece. Once that had happened, there was only one question left: Who was going to pay the cost of all the debt Greece has run up or all the production decisions made that have left Greece without the capacity to export, with a dependence on imports etc.? And at that point, as has happened in every country – Greece is in no way unique – the wealthy and the business community went to work, with their resources and their business connections, to make sure that they didn’t pay the price.

The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than “leftist” or “far left” or “hardline” – the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?

An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.

These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.

“Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory”, declared a Guardian headline on January 25. “Radical leftists” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics”. It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they “anti austerity”.

For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy – in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values – and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp.

Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious”. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose “bailout” in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished.

For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it “intolerable” and “the dung of the devil”. The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.

In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor “leftists” nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their “secret austerity plans” in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands – which he has now accepted.

When the Greek electorate voted “no” on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, “Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people”. Greeks had not voted for “better terms”. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.

The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt – as Argentina did successfully – and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms”.

The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than “leftist” or “far left” or “hardline” – the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?

In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: “Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism… I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated… Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher’s victory]… What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself…?”

Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain “scorned socialist change” – when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change – he echoes Blair.

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left”, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.

The Greek debt, as such, is mostly not Greek debt. The debt which Germany and other nations are demanding that they pay for, is money that the Greeks never got! So the Greeks don’t owe that money. This was a swindle, because the Greeks didn’t incur that debt.

Lyndon LaRouche, Feb. 17, 2015

What Americans need to know about Greece and “its debt,” is that the new Greek government is asking the European Union to shut down a huge Wall Street-London bank swindle and make economic growth possible again in Europe.

If that doesn’t happen, the worsening bankruptcy of the whole trans-Atlantic banking system will continue to generate desperate confrontations with major powers Russia and China, with the threat of world war.

The rest of Europe, so far, is refusing to shut that Wall Street swindle down, and today Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew backed up that refusal, including by a threatening phone call to the Greek finance minister.

What Obama, Merkel, et al. are demanding Greece do, instead of shutting down this Europe-wide swindle by the banks, is run a budget surplus of 4.5% of its annual economy, exclusively to pay the “Greek debt.” In U.S. terms? That would mean the United States running a government tax surplus of $750 billion a year, in order to pay down debt. You won’t hear Obama or Lew volunteering to try it; it is impossible.

The “Greek debt” swindle is the same one as the TARP bailout here, and the Federal Reserve’s printing of $4 trillion in new money to cover Wall Street’s debts; and its perpetrators are the same huge banks.

In the United States, the big banks took millions of subprime, unrepayable mortgages sold by their captive mortgage companies, and made them into toxic securities which blew up the financial system and the whole economy in 2008; the government bailed them out, while our living standards plunged.

In Europe, the banks bought the mortgage securities from the U.S. banks. At the same time they made millions of unrepayable subprime loans of their own — not only to homeowners, but also to governments without the means to repay them, like those of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Hungary, and others. Big Wall Street banks were involved, particularly Goldman Sachs, which created “magic” derivatives: Take a bank loan to Greece, make it look like a mere “currency swap” rather than a debt — but turn it into a much bigger debt ten years later.

All this European subprime debt blew up on the big banks in 2009, a year after the U.S. subprime debt blew up on them. Then the European governments allsuperindebted themselves, to create a $1 trillion “European TARP” called by the initials EFSF. They bailed the megabanks out, with the IMF pitching in, using “only” about $600 billion to pay the unpayable “subprime government debt” part of it. $275 billion paid “Greek debt.”

This immense bank bailout got passed through the Greek, Irish, etc. governments, which passed it immediately on to the banks which had been their “subprime lenders.”

We have to spill this thing as a leading issue in the U.S. You can sink Wall Street on this one. If you sink the Greek swindle, you’re going to start a chain-reaction explosion of the international trans-Atlantic system, like the Wall Street system and similar things, the British andothers. They are the ones who owe the debt, not the Greeks.

— Lyndon LaRouche • Feb. 17, 2015

The Greek debt swindle was classic. In 2009 Greece’s debt was $300 billion. It then “got” two huge bailouts in 2010 and 2012, of about $140 billion each. Less than 10% of that $275 billion stayed in Greece and was spent by the Greek government; more than 90% went directly and immediately to Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and their fellow sharks, with small amounts crumbling to the hedge funds swimming alongside. Former Greek Labor and Social Security Minister Louka Katseli has given documentation that the Greek government actually got to spend or invest just 3% of that $275 billion. The only banks which had to write off their “Greek debt” were Greek banks; all of Wall Street and the London-centered banks got their toxic debt “assets” guaranteed 100% by this European bailout swindle. This made the Greek banks so bankrupt that the Greek government then had to borrow more to bail them out with $50 billion — so Greece’s debt was increased when supposedly being reduced! A total swindle!

Then, between 2010 and today, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, etc. were ordered to pay the bill for this huge new Europe-wide bank bailout debt. They imposed a slashing domestic austerity until their people emigrated, death rates rose and birth rates fell, and clouds of wood smoke rose over modern cities whose inhabitants could no longer afford modern heat. After five years of this punishment, Greece’s $300 billion debt has become $350 billion or so — after $250 billion passed through to the banks!

And the other European countries are also on the hook for this phony debt, all of it. They guaranteed it; Greece and Ireland and the other austerity-crushed countries can’t pay it, so the rest of Europe must either agree to reorganize that debt and write it down, or their taxpayers will pay for the swindle.

This is why the new Greek government now demands that Europe shut down this global bank swindle: Write off the unpayable debt; invest in reviving economic productivity by building new economic infrastructure.

In addition, the megabanks have to be put through a Glass-Steagall reorganization and broken up.

To which Lyndon LaRouche has added:

“This thing has to be put loud and clear on every doorstep in the United States. If you want to avoid World War III, that’s what you’ll do.”

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, after the forces of the fascist Kiev regime fled under fire today from encircled Debaltsevo, an actual ceasefire is now in effect, however fragile, and heavy weapons are being withdrawn from the front lines by both sides, as agreed by the leaders of the French, German, Ukrainian, and Russian governments at Minsk last week. To make it an enduring ceasefire, all we need do now, is immediately remove Nazi Victoria Nuland from the State Department.

Under circumstances of a quasi-world crash of financial markets, the government submitted to the European Stability Mechanism for re-financing. Requesting a new debt for the old. With this application, the country most directly subordinate to the permanent mechanism for controlled bankruptcy and dissolution.

The ESM is not something simple. It is a controlled bankruptcy institution based in Luxembourg for the eurozone countries that are unable to cope with their debts. The Treaty on the ESM is but one debt treaty to protect the euro. The board and the CEO have ultimate authority over the Member States must comply “unconditionally and irrevocably” as defined in the verbatim Treaty establishing the ESM. In essence it is about the set up of an uncontrolled organization based in Luxembourg that is not subject to any control and no authority, legal or other form.

Let’s see what is foreseen under the Establishing Treaty on the ESM. Succinctly with Article 32 par. 2 of the Treaty: “The ESM has full legal personality and has full legal capacity:

a) to acquire and dispose of movable and immovable property,

b) to contract,

c) to institute legal proceedings and

d) to conclude an agreement and / or protocols for the seat as necessary, to ensure the recognition and enforcement of the legal status and privileges and immunities. ”

The par. 3 of the same article states: “The ESM, real estate, its resources and its assets, regardless of location and owner, shall be immune from any form of legal proceedings, unless the ESM expressly waive its immunity for the purposes of any procedure, under the terms of any contract, including documentation of financial instruments.”

The par. 4 of the same article states: “The property, funds and assets of the ESM, regardless of location and holder, be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation or any other form of seizure, removal or detention under executive , judicial, administrative or legislative measures. ”

The par. 5 and 6 of the same article states: “The archives of the ESM and all documents belonging to the ESM or held to be inviolable. The premises of the ESM’s facilities shall be inviolable.”

While par. 8 and 9 of the same article states: “To the extent necessary for the performance of activities provided for in this Treaty, all property, funds and assets of the ESM shall not be subject to any restriction, regulation , control and moratoria of any nature. The ESM is exempted from any authorization or licensing obligation as a credit institution, investment services provider or other official licensed or regulated entity under the laws of each member of the ESM. ”

In fact Article 32 par. 8 of the Treaty establishing the ESM out: “To the extent necessary for the performance of activities provided for in this Treaty, all property, funds and assets of the ESM shall not be subject to any restrictions, regulation, control and moratoria of any nature. ”

In other words, the loans and the guarantees will be distracted by the ESM from the Member State which is under the tutelage of “not subject to any restriction, regulation, control and moratoria of any nature.” And so the debtor Member State is bound to suffer that decided in absentia without even the right to negotiate in order to supposedly achieve any restrictions, regulations, controls and moratoria in how the lending by the ESM will take place.

What happens when the ESM shall authorize the opening of a new financing program for Greece? Then drawn up “with the member of ESM memorandum of understanding (” MK “) describing in detail the conditions to be attached to facilitate financial assistance. The content of the MK reflects the weaknesses to be addressed and the financial assistance instrument chosen. “(Article 13, par. 3) Therefore any new funding must be accompanied by a” Memorandum of Understanding “, such as those imposed on us until today.

The new is that the “MK [Memorandum of Understanding] is fully consistent with the provisions for coordination of economic policies provided for in the TFEU [Operation Treaty on European Union], especially any acts of European Union law, including any opinion, warning, recommendation or a decision addressed to the ESM Member concerned. “(in the same article) that this time the Memorandum is a bilateral agreement with the state in funding, such as Greece, the result of a specific loan agreement. It falls to the TFEU and EU law.

What does this mean; It means that the application of the Memorandum is not something separate from our country’s participation in the “European integration” and therefore compliance with the memorandum, included in Article 28 of the Constitution “provides for restrictions on the exercise of national sovereignty,” to facilitate “participation of the Country in European integration,” as expressly mentioned in the explanatory statement of this article.

That is why the ‘European Commission signs the MK on behalf of the ESM “(par. 4), and also the’ European Commission – in cooperation with the ECB and wherever possible, together with the IMF – made responsible for monitoring the compliance with the conditions attached to the financial assistance facility. “(para. 5).

In other words the Member State that borrows directly from the ESM loses not only its national sovereignty, but its very state of existence. The government must “unconditionally and irrevocably” follow exactly what the European Commission and the Governing Board of the ESM decides. In other words, with our accession to the ESM, as the country Greece we are finished. We are converted into a plot in a liquidation mechanism. And all this with the left in government.

4 days after the Greek people’s resounding “NO to the continuation of negotiations with the EU / ECB on the Greek people’s expense”, the Greek government yesterday announced that they will apply that Greece be incorporated in the super state EMS “help activities” so therefore in practice it cease to exist as an independent and sovereign nation. That is how Tsipras and the European Goebbels media interpreted the Greek people’s NO last Sunday. The ESM is a supranational organization, which was inaugurated October 8, 2012 and which as a legal entity in principle have the same rights as an independent state.

The masks have really fallen and now all of Greece sees who is really who, and that it only is two sides that actually exist in this ugly game and on the Greek people’s expense. Actually on all the European peoples expense, and with democracy shackled to both hands and feet. The people of Greece are not divided due to the referendum as the media mean. On the contrary, the Greeks are a more united people than ever, and the poisonous civil war doctrine, the left-right politics, begin to blur and instead people increasingly judge persons and behaviour under the parameters Democrat or anti-Democrat and of Greece and the Greek people’s best or banks and the business elite’s best. These exist in all parties (though quite thin on “democrats” in the Golden Dawn presumably).

“One should be quite clear with the fact that the only two real parties in this ugly pan-European game is the EU oligarchs and their serving-governments with their “diabolical” propaganda apparatus on the one hand, and the European nations, excluded its financial, business and political elite, on the other side.” I wrote this a few days ago and this truth is good to keep fresh in mind during the coming weeks “EU’s play”.

When will people really start to wonder when the hell all these super organizations was passed? When was the Europeans informed adequately on this? Did they have their say in this context? How many know today what the ESM really is?

Strange that the educated and well articulate journalists have such difficulties to interpret a word of only three letters. The tens of thousands of banners and posters all over Greece as well as the approximately 4 million Greeks slogans on streets and squares in recent days, were not clear enough, says both the news parrots and their own government.

The panic among news readers, commentators and assorted “experts” in the Greek TV channels, was complete last night. So much drivel and hair-raising theories about how to interpret this NO. Most of them managed to twist it to that “NO meant “NO to a break with the EU”. And then the Swedish lawmakers on sex crimes claim that NO always is a NO. What about the rape case of Greece?

The interpretations, over the whole range, of course was that NO actually means yes and that no one in Greece really wants to leave the euro and the EU. Despite the fact that people across the country have spoken of “NO to the occupation”, which is how we all see the Eurogroup’s and in particular the German government’s role in Greece. These parrots need to broaden the horizons a little bit and stop drinking their coffee only in the highly polished in-cafés, where both staff and guests poses with the ridiculously bleached jaws and the ridiculously unnatural smiles.

Then came the real “turn off”, Tsipras own “victory speech”, in which he assured that he does not take the Greeks vote as if he had been commissioned to break with Europe, but to negotiate better terms for the “cooperation”. Firstly, you never call a choke leash “cooperation”, and secondly, we want him to throw off his choke leash and begin to actually lay the issues of the legitimacy of the debt and the agreements legitimacy on the table, and with the support in international law and even on the advice from the UN’s own human rights adviser, to refuse to pay the creditors and announce that Greece will not pay the debt and declare the debt and the loan agreement illegal.

Let the international courts deal with the matter and in the meantime Greece will not pay a single euro of the legally challenged debt. Why this would pose any problem to the Greeks, no sensible person who manages to count has really understood, despite all the doomsday propaganda in the media? If the Greeks do not pay usury-debt and therefore do not need to take new loans to pay back the last five years forced, unfair loans, there is enough money for salaries, pensions, healthcare, education, infrastructure, social and health insurances and necessities for the people.

That is in any case, what a Prime Minister and a government that works for its people and not for the banks and businessmen would do.

If someone, with such “wind in the sails” and with the main international legal bodies advice to refuse to pay, still doesn’t interpret a NO as a “NO to this sort of Europe”, one clearly have different allegiances than what one show. So his own interpretation was thus NYES. His victory speech sounded as if it was YES the people said. Didn’t he read the banners and didn’t he hear the slogans, or didn’t he see the graffiti across Athens that said “NO” and “RAUS”? Didn’t his party members pass the people’s “don’t you dare” message to any further negotiations with EU/ECB, on the people’s sacrifices, on the illegal debt and its inhumane choke leash called “loan agreement”? “Even if this would mean to leave the euro and a break with the EU,” was the clear message that echoed throughout Greece to the government on Sunday.

What this referendum has done and that actually is of great value, is that it caused a climate of panic where all masks has finally fallen and they have revealed themselves and their real purposes to the people. Today we clearly see what real loyalties each and every one has and whose interests they are working for. The political leadership, the news channels, the terrorized YES voters, the pretending democrats and the pretending left has been unmasked. Those who have maintained and lived on the corruption and the nepotism which overturned Greece now stands “nude” and with “their hand up to the elbow in the cookie jar.”

This can force Tsipras to new elections and a wider coalition or a new technocrat government type Papademo’s government. In the worst case, a military dictatorship to put the Greeks in the “plaster cradle” again as that psychopath-colonel, dictator and CIA agent Papadopoulos put it, in April 21, 1967. It will be very interesting to see how the vast majority of SYRIZA will react to Tsipras, to say the least, treacherous NO interpretation. It is doubtful whether he can handle this to the end of the month, to not say the end of the week, as he again reappears to the negotiations in political “shorts” to communicate the Greek people’s position to the Brussels and Berlin commandants.

I must inform everyone who still believe the European news media’s version of what happens in Greece, and what they report about Greece and the referendum, that a huge “yes”-propaganda machinery has been unleashed from all those who with their “courts” have brought the country to this position. Of course with huge foreign support and help, since at least WWII.

EPAM’s general secretary the economist Dimitris Kazakis says:

“The YES-side is struggling to hide that YES means confiscation of deposits, salary, pension, private and public property of Greek citizens, as required by the lenders. YES means the release of layoffs without compensation, permanency of the interests of the employer, unemployment and temporary short-term work for the vast majority of Greeks. It means the continuance and increase of misery, soup kitchens, suicides and deaths because of lack of the basic necessities. All this that the lenders call bailout.

And the government? What is the government doing? At the same time that they are closing the banks, leaving them at the mercy of the deliberately caused panic among the pensioners and the private sector, in the Government Gazette, Sheet no. 1295, June 30, 2015, the government gives new guarantees in public to the Eurobank, so that this particular bank can sell its own bonds of around 1.91 billion euros, and to the Greek National Bank for 4.26 billion euros.

The government supports bankrupt banks and guarantees that the Greek taxpayer will pay their debts if these banks cannot. But when it comes to protect the people’s savings, wages and pensions, they hold up their hands. It closes banks, puts a ceiling on withdrawals and paves the way for “haircut” savings from the first euro.

At the same time, and while having announced a referendum, Mr. Tsipras submit an ostensibly own proposal based on which the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) will redeem the IMF. In other words, it suggests that the Greek should be further burdened with the IMF debt with ESM money and with at least twice the rate.

And the worst, he proposes to put the whole country under the ESM, which operates as a super state with complete immunity and privileges capitulations. This will move away from the IMF, which is unable to declare Greece bankrupt the and thus surrender completely to the ESM. To a super state that has the ability to sell, dismantle, cut and maim entire Greece.

Even though he wants to hide it Mr. Tsipras can not. He is with the YES even if he in public says NO. As does the leadership of Perissos (head quarters of the communist-party) that very much would like to say yes, but for show throws in an invalid vote. The referendum has already clarified the cloudy landscape. Every crook goes back to his own counter and shows his true colors.”

The yes-side, everyone should know, are those who have become used to not work for their income, but want to keep a position in the corrupt system and the subservient Greece of the cartels and the European banksters. They exist in the top of all the established parties in Greece and in all top channels in Greece and all of them are dependent on money from the different private and political interests, domestic as foreign. It’s all those who want to keep Greece a plutocracy and an oligarchy in dependence and in the lap of the foreign vultures. And I am not talking about serious investors who have long-term interests in Greece and in accordance with the Greek people’s interests, but the vultures that roam from country to country waiting for national collapses and is pushing for such things to happen and who lives on blood money and crimes against humanity… These are the ones that EU generally mean when they talk about “investors” and those are the ones that the Eurogroup doesn’t want to disappoint.

Anyone who are advocating a “yes” in this referendum wants to put Greece in a final colonial status to Brussels and Berlin and the Greek people to become debt-serfs in their own country…

Since the images of fighting pensionaries’ stomping on eachother or chaos and havoc in ATM queues that the photographers wanted didn’t actually occur to extent that they expected, they simply arranged them or in some cases I even saw images from other parts of the world broadcasted by European media as if they were from Athens… Even a number of buses from Sofia was chartered by ND-members and filled with Bulgarians, who for 100 Euro per head acted as “yes-supporters” on Syntagma on the YES-rally. Friends tried to talk with some people and they talked some Slavic language they told me and many others discovered the same… The current European propaganda machinery is not only spreading a ridiculous kind of black “journalism” but it also is a great humiliation to the intelligence and the common sense of the European citizen. Well apart from a few remote and intellectually dark corners of Europe.

In Sweden where I happen to be at the moment, unfortunately as always almost everyone are more or less very supportive of EU’s “defend-the-criminals-and-blame-the-victims” policy, the austerity-policies and they are completely influenced by the European Brussels directed media, so they listen to and trust every imaginable crap that comes out of every media-parrot’s beak in TV. The alleged critical voices in main stream media are ludicrous and on a level that not even kids in first class would believe in Greece, Spain and Portugal. In Sweden those voices are the absolute limit for what they can handle.

But forget about the Swedes. The Europeans that are actually able to critically follow the current events are not that stupid or that well conditioned, so at this time in history the masks are falling and everyone will show their right faces and their right intents and I have quite solid reason to believe that the nations and the people in Europe with a spine will stand up and do their historic duty. The Swedes will read about it and get the point in the history books in 60 or 70 years.

After five months of fruitless negotiations between Greece and its lenders, the Greek Prime Minister blasted the Institutions for submitting proposals that would destroy Greece and humiliate its people. So he proposed that a referendum be held next Sunday with the question of whether or not the Greek people support the EU proposals. On Sunday morning parliament adopted the proposal and the referendum will be held next Sunday.

The EU proposals were rejected because they would have devastating effects on the country. They anticipated reduction of wages and pensions, increase in food prices and other measures affecting the middle and lower classes.

The EU never expected that the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras would dare ask for a referendum. Now attempts will be made by the EU and other circles to prevent the referendum from happening as was done in 2010. Already Christine Lagarde of the IMF made statements today saying that the Referendum will be invalid because after Tuesday the proposals will no longer exist. The Eurogroup also rejected a request from Greece to extend the exisiting program until after the referendum. Consequently as from Tuesday, the so-called financing of Greece from the institutions will stop and Greece will be obliged to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF. More attempts will take place during the week by creating panic to the people in the means of preventing access to their accounts, fomenting internal unrest etc. The EU is good in this. We saw what happened in Kiev in December 2013. But panic exists in the EU where the fear is spreading that the eurozone is collapsing.

If the outcome of the referendum is NO, then presumabely the government will inform the institutions of the will of the Greek people. It cannot be excluded that the Government denounces the Loan agreement of 2010 on the basis of articles 48-52 of the Vienna Treaty on Treaties which anticipate under which conditions an international treaty is null and void,and it covers the Greek case too. The denunciation in written form will be sent to the Secretary general of the UN, since the Vienna Treaty has been deposited at the UN, and Greece will legally stop all payments to the lenders since the Loan Agreement will be null and void. The money kept will help Greece in its road towards economic recovery. The next step will be the gradual and orderly exit of Greece from the eurozone, which will take place in a period of six months to one year. This position is also supported by the Unified Popular Front (EPAM), a party of which I am a member, and it will actively participate in support of the no vote.

If the outcome of the referendum is yes then the road for Greece to achieve colonial status will become a reality.

We are witnessing an incredible event, the EU destroying its member-states. During the last five years, the member states of the Eurozone, the EU as an institution, the IMF which is only a specialized agency of the UN, and the previous Greek governments,have violated most existing international treaties on the respect for human rights, i.e. the Lisbon treaty, the International Covenant of economic, social and cultural rights, the UN Charter etc, making them also criminally responsible for these violations. But this not our EU, it is not the EU that neither Greece, Portugal or Spain joined. It is an aberration.

I personally hope that this Greek revolution spreads to Portugal and Spain and to the other EU countries for the benefit of the peoples of Europe and of humanity.

Introduction: Over the past decade fundamental changes have taken place in Southern Europe, which have broken with previous political alignments, resulting in the virtual disappearance of traditional leftist ’parties, the decline of trade unions and the emergence of ‘middle class radicalism’.

New political movements, purportedly on the left, no longer are based on class conscious workers nor are they embedded in the class struggle. Likewise on the right, greater attention is paid to escalating the repressive capacity of the state instead of state intervention in pursuit of economic markets.

Radicalization of the right, including massive cutbacks in social spending, has demolished welfare programs. The dispossession of households has uprooted cohesive neighborhood-based social organizations.

In place of the class based traditional left, ‘non-leftist left’ movements have emerged. Their leaders embrace ‘participatory democracy’ but engage in vertical political practice.

On the right, politics no longer revolve around conserving national economic privileges. Rightwing leaders willingly subordinate their economies and society to imperial led crusades, which empty national sovereignty of any meaning while pillaging the national treasury.

This essay will proceed to discuss these complex changes and their meaning.

The ‘Non-Leftist Left’ in Southern Europe

The economic crisis, in particular the imposition of severe cuts in wages, pensions and other social welfare programs by rightwing and social democratic governments have led to widespread discontent, which the traditional workplace based leftist parties have been unable to address and mobilize the people. Prolonged and deepening unemployment and the growth of temporary employment have affected over 50% of the labor force.

Union representation has declined precipitously, further weakening the presence of traditional leftist parties in factories.

Large-scale evictions, foreclosure of mortgages and accompanying job losses have led to neighborhood-based anti-eviction movements and struggles. Millions of young workers now depend on their grandparents’ pensions and remain with two older generations in their parents’ home. For the young workers, the degradation of everyday life, the loss of personal autonomy and the inability to live independently have led to revolts for ‘dignity’.

The traditional left parties and trade unions have failed (or not attempted) to organize the unemployed. They have failed to attract the young and the downwardly mobile temporary workers in anything resembling class-based, class struggle-oriented movements.

Paradoxically despite the deepening crisis among most workers, the traditional left has declined. Its workplace orientation and its language of class struggle do not resonate with those without jobs or prospects. For the radicalized middle class the traditional left is too radical in seeking to overturn capitalism and too distant from power to realize changes.

The radicalized middle class includes public employees, professionals and self-employed private contractors who aspire to, and until recently, experienced upward mobility but have now found their path blocked by the austerity programs imposed by rightwing, as well as, social democratic parties.

Frustrated by the social democrats’ betrayal and facing downward mobility, the radicalized middle class are disoriented and fragmented. Many have joined amorphous street protests; some have even embraced, temporarily in most cases, the alternative traditional rightwing parties only to encounter even more brutal job cuts, insecurity and downward mobility.

The middle classes deeply resent being denied the opportunity for upward mobility for themselves and their children. They resent their formerly ‘moderately progressive’ Social Democratic leaders’ betrayal of their interests. Their radicalism is directed toward restoring their past access to social advancement. Their deep-seated hostility to the authorities is rooted in the loss of their previous status as a result of the crisis.

Middle class radicalism is tempered by nostalgia for the past. This radicalism is rooted in the struggle to restore the European Union’s social subsidies and growth policies. They remember a recent past of rising living standards and “social inclusion”, now denied their own children. This vision guides the rhetoric that the progressive middle class had earned and enjoyed theirrising incomes as a result of their own ‘merit’.

Today the radicalized middle class looks for practical, specifically defined and government-sponsored policies that can restore their past prosperity. They do not aim to ‘level the playing field’ for everyone but to prevent their proletariazation. They reject the politics of the traditional left parties because class struggle and worker-centered ideologies do not promote their own social aspirations.

For most radicalized middle class activists the culprits are ‘austerity’, the mega-bank swindlers and the political kleptocrats. They seek parties that can reform or moralize capitalism and restore ‘individual dignity’. They want to kick out corrupt officials. They demand ‘participatory democracy’ rather than the traditional left’s goal of public ownership under worker control.

Under the specific conditions generated by the current social crisis, a non-leftist left (NLL) has emerged throughout Europe. Spontaneous, amorphous, ‘anarchic’, extra-institutional and ‘street-centered’, the NLL has adopted an irreverent style. The NLL, in its origins, rejected political parties, well-defined programs and disciplined cadres in favor of spontaneity and irreverence toward institutions.

As the appeal of the NLL grew, the unemployed, the temporary workers, the insecure and unprotected non-unionized workers and the radicalized middle class joined demonstrations and found safety in the crowds. They were attracted by the appeals from ‘the street’ to oust the incumbent kleptocrats.

Emerging from this movement aimed at the downwardly mobile middle class’ anger, Podemosin Spain, Syriza in Greece and Five Stars in Italy have appealed to all the people disconnected from power, by promising a restoration of ‘dignity and respect.’ They made amorphous appeals to ‘end austerity’ with only a vague promise that they would create jobs.

The NLL leadership, however, is most clearly influenced by the non-radical resentments of the downwardly mobile middle class.

They never engaged in class struggles and have rejected class ideology. For the NLL leaders, social polarization is mostly a vehicle for building an electoral base. Their participation in small-scale local struggles was presented as ‘proof’ that the NLL leaders spoke to authentic popular aspirations.

The Non-Leftist Left’s Transition: From Street to Public Office

From the street, the NLL moved swiftly to elections and from elections they proceeded to form coalitions with traditional parties. Strategic decisions were taken by a small coterie of personalistic leaders: They redefined ‘participatory democracy’ to refer only to local neighborhood activism and issues – not national issues, which were the realm of ‘experts’.

Syriza, the first NLL to reach power, reflected the immense gap between the radical posturingof its leaders in opposition and their cringing conformity before Established Power (the Troika: IMF, European Commission, Central Bank) once elected to government.

Syriza embodied middle class resentment toward the Euro-technocratic elite in Brussels whom they blamed for their loss of past prosperity and job security and for the ongoing degradation of everyday life. Syriza denounced the Troika while it remained under its tutelage. It excoriatedthe EU elite in the highest moral tones for doing what its elite class interests dictated, that is, defend the EU bankers, extract debt payments and threaten their underlings. In practice,Syriza never applied any class analysis to the Troika’s policy as it continued to refer to their ‘EU partners’. ..even as they imposed brutall demands.

Once in power the Syriza leaders never mobilized a single mass protest and never even threatened a general strike in the face of EU colonial dictates.

Syriza’s personalist leader, Alexis Tsipra,s appointed right wingers from former regimes to key posts. He negotiated with the Troika and caved on all strategic issues dealing with debt payments, austerity and privatizations. Syriza never considered ‘going to the people’. Syriza’s‘moral crusade’ against capitalism ended by their embracing capitalism and the colonial Eurozone system.

Syriza’s lack of class analysis, class struggle and class mobilization and its total commitment to working within a moralized capitalism and the Eurozone to restore middle class status and security has resulted in the most abject conformity and surrender – punctuated by shameless buffoonery on the part of some leaders.

In the end, Syriza surrendered to the dictates of higher powers of the Troika ad their Eurozone acolytes, but not until it had emptied the Greek Treasury. The leaders have combined the worst of all worlds: a bankrupt national economy, a ‘protesting’ but fundamentally colonial regime and a disenchanted electorate.

Where Syriza wildly succeeded was in marginalizing the traditional left (the Greek Communist Party). It reaffirmed the historic pattern: free floating movements of the moment end up being run by personalistic leaders who presume to speak for “the people” while bending over to their overseas overlords.

NLL in Spain and Italy: Podemos and Five Stars

Podemos in Spain and Five Stars in Italy are ready to follow Syriza’s path of colonial subservience. They rejected and successfully marginalized the traditional left. They have gained mass support, organized mass protests and loudly rejected austerity and the dictates of the Troika.

While Podemos leaders talk of ‘participatory democracy’, a handful of leaders make all policy pronouncements, decide which candidates to support in the elections and determine what kind of post-election coalition governments they will join.

What gives Podemos and Five Stars their radical appearance is their opposition to the governing parties, their rejection of ‘austerity’, their criticism of neoliberalism – and their support for ‘micro-politics’ of local grassroots direct-action.

At no time or place have they counterpoised an alternative to capitalism. Nor have they repudiated illicit debts or supported the expropriation of the banks responsible for the pillage their economies.

Podemos and Five Stars deliberately obscure their politics: They are whatever any of their affiliates’ claim to be…

The leaders raise populist demands and speak about ‘dignity’, employment and punishment of corrupt officials. They call for an end to authoritarian measures, but avoid any real commitments to institutional change, especially of the repressive courts, police or armed forces.

Podemos and Five Stars criticize the EU’s austerity programs while staying in the EU as subordinate members of an organization dominated by German bankers. They promote popular mobilizations which they have turned into vote-gathering machines for electing their members to office.

The NLLs contradictory politics of populist gestures and institutional commitments reflect the politics of a frustrated and blocked middle class demanding a restoration of its past status and security. Podemos and Five Stars leaders put on the grand show of thumbing their noses at the establishment to promote limited middle class demands. On a much broader front, the leaders of the NLL have not organized any mass protests – let alone formed a mass movement which would seriously challenge the imperialist powers, NATO, the Middle East wars and US-EU sanctions against Russia.

Since most of their supporters are anti NATO, in favor of Palestinian independence and critical of the Kiev regime the popular base of the NLL will act on their own but will have no real impact on the current national leadership.

The reason for the disparity between leaders and followers is clear: The NLL leaders intend to form post-electoral coalitions with the corrupt and reactionary ‘center left’ parties so despised and rejected by their own electorate.

Following the nationwide Spanish municipal and regional elections, Podemos allied with corrupt Socialist Party (PSOE). In the municipality of Madrid, Podemos supported the left-center coalition Ahora Madrid (Madrid Now), which in turn has allied with the center-right Socialists to elect the ‘progressive’ mayoral candidate, Manuela Carmena.

While the entire ‘progressive camp’ celebrates the defeat of the hard-right Popular Party candidate –little has been said about consequential changes in the municipal and regional budgets, structures of economic power and class relations.

‘Five Stars’,( Movimento Cinque Stelle or M5S), Italy’s non-leftist left is dominated by a single ‘anti-leader’, Beppe Grillo, he defines the party’s programs and affiliations. He is known for making clownish, provocative gestures against the authorities, calling for a “Fuck the Parliament Day”.

It is Beppe who selects the candidates to run for Parliament. While in opposition, M5S loudly opposed all NATO wars in the Middle East, US military interventions in Latin America and free trade agreements. But now ensconced in the European Parliament, Beppe has aligned with the Libertarian Right.

Five Stars (M5S) central demands revolve around ‘direct democracy’ and ‘sustainable development’. It has captured the electoral support of the majority of the lower middle classgaining 26% of the vote (9 million voters) in the 2013 general elections.

While Beppe and his colleagues engage in fist fights within the Parliament, make radical gestures and spout belligerent rhetoric, ‘M5S’ has not supported a workers general strike. It participates in each and every election, but has stayed away from factory struggles.

Radicalism, as grand ‘gesture politics’, is an entertaining, non-threatening response to capitalism since there is no concerted effort to form class alliances with workers engaged in workplace struggles.

‘M5S’, like Podemos and Syriza, expresses the disorganized radicalism of the young, frustrated lower middle class raging against their downward mobility, while refusing to breakwith the EU .They rail against the concentration of power in the hands of the banks, but refuse to pursue their nationalization. M5S mobilized 800,000 people in Rome recently but led them nowhere. ‘Five Stars’ convokes crowds to meet and cheer its leaders and to ridicule the power brokers. Afterwards they all go home.

Conclusion

While the ‘NLL’ movements capture the support of the ‘indignant’, the mass of unemployed workers and the evicted householders, their leaders do not articulate a serious plan of action capable of challenging the economic power structures: they raise popular expectations via demands for ‘change’. However, these vague and deceptive slogans allow the NLL leaders to join in a medley of opportunist electoral coalitions and governmental alliances, with decidedly establishment personalities and parties.

In Greece, Italy and Spain the traditional left has either disappeared, or shrunk to a marginal force. With little or no base outside of the workplace and trade unions, they barely secure five percent of the votes.

The NLL has deepened the isolation of the traditional left and has even attracted a part of its social base. NLL’s rejection of the traditional left’s tight organization and top down leadership and its pluralistic rhetoric appeals to the young. Moreover, as the left trade unions have sought compromises with the bosses to save the jobs of employed workers and ignored the unemployed, the latter has looked to the ‘open and spontaneous’NLL to express their opposition. In Spain’s municipal elections, the United Left, a Communist-led electoral formation, joined with Podemos to elect Manuela Carmena, the ‘insurgent mayor’ of Madrid.

While the Euro-US academic left has rightly celebrated the emergence of mass opposition to the rightist regimes in Southern Europe, they have failed to understand the internal dynamicswithin the NLL movements: the limitations of middle class radicalism and their conformists’ goals.

The example of Syriza in Greece is a warning of the fatal consequences of middle class leaders trying to realize radical changes, within the neo-liberal framework imposed by the EU.

Epilogue

Currently, the best example of the opportunism and bankruptcy of the NLL is found in the successful Mayor-elect of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, whose victory was hailed by Podemos as the ‘great victory for the people’ at recent celebration.

For her part, Mayor-elect Carmena has wasted no time repudiating all ‘five basic emergency reforms’ promised during the elections. In a press conference, the so-called ‘progressive Mayor of Madrid’ announced (with a cynical grin) that ‘promise number one’ – a public bank – was no longer needed because she was satisfied to work with the private banking oligarchy. She refused to pursue ‘promise number two’ – to provide subsidies for electricity, water and gas for poor families cut off from those services, claiming such support was too early and could wait until winter

Regarding Podemos ‘promise number three’ – a debt moratorium, Carmena insisted that “we will keep paying, for now”. On ‘promise number four’ favoring public over private contractors for municipal contracts, Carmena reversed the position: “We can’t change right away”.

Carmena even repudiated ‘promise number five’ – to immediately implement a summer meals program for poor children, insisting that she would rely on the inadequate programs of far right predecessor.

Moreover, Mayor-elect Carmena went even further, staffing her administration with far-right holdovers from the previous government to strategic policy-making positions. For example, sheappointed Carmen Roman, a former Director General of the far right Prime Minister Aznar, as Senior Executive of Madrid. She defended these reactionary decisions claiming that she was looking for “technocrats who are the best professional administrations”. Indeed, Carmen Roman had implemented mass firing of public workers and the dismantling of social programs in the ‘best professional’ manner possible!

Carmena further betrayed her Podemos electorate by insisting she looked forward to working with the hard right Prime Minister Rajoy and flatly rejected the idea of promoting a progressive alternative!

In less than one week, the euphoria over the victory of Podemos backed candidates has been dissipated by these acts of cynical opportunism: the non-leftist left has betrayed its electorate, from the very start!

Many countries in the world see the U.S. as the single greatest external threat to their societies.

During the latest episode of the Washington farce that has astonished a bemused world, a Chinese commentator wrote that if the United States cannot be a responsible member of the world system, perhaps the world should become “de-Americanized” — and separate itself from the rogue state that is the reigning military power but is losing credibility in other domains.

The Washington debacle’s immediate source was the sharp shift to the right among the political class. In the past, the U.S. has sometimes been described sardonically — but not inaccurately — as a one-party state: the business party, with two factions called Democrats and Republicans.

That is no longer true. The U.S. is still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction: moderate Republicans, now called New Democrats (as the U.S. Congressional coalition styles itself).

There is still a Republican organization, but it long ago abandoned any pretense of being a normal parliamentary party. Conservative commentator Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute describes today’s Republicans as “a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”: a serious danger to the society.

The party is in lock-step service to the very rich and the corporate sector. Since votes cannot be obtained on that platform, the party has been compelled to mobilize sectors of the society that are extremist by world standards. Crazy is the new norm among Tea Party members and a host of others beyond the mainstream.

The Republican establishment and its business sponsors had expected to use them as a battering ram in the neoliberal assault against the population — to privatize, to deregulate and to limit government, while retaining those parts that serve wealth and power, like the military.

The Republican establishment has had some success, but now finds that it can no longer control its base, much to its dismay. The impact on American society thus becomes even more severe. A case in point: the virulent reaction against the Affordable Care Act and the near-shutdown of the government.

The Chinese commentator’s observation is not entirely novel. In 1999, political analyst Samuel P. Huntington warned that for much of the world, the U.S. is “becoming the rogue superpower,” seen as “the single greatest external threat to their societies.”

A few months into the Bush term, Robert Jervis, president of the American Political Science Association, warned that “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” Both Huntington and Jervis warned that such a course is unwise. The consequences for the U.S. could be harmful.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading establishment journal, David Kaye reviews one aspect of Washington’s departure from the world: rejection of multilateral treaties “as if it were sport.”

He explains that some treaties are rejected outright, as when the U.S. Senate “voted against the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2012 and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999.”

Others are dismissed by inaction, including “such subjects as labor, economic and cultural rights, endangered species, pollution, armed conflict, peacekeeping, nuclear weapons, the law of the sea, and discrimination against women.”

Rejection of international obligations “has grown so entrenched,” Kaye writes, “that foreign governments no longer expect Washington’s ratification or its full participation in the institutions treaties create. The world is moving on; laws get made elsewhere, with limited (if any) American involvement.”

While not new, the practice has indeed become more entrenched in recent years, along with quiet acceptance at home of the doctrine that the U.S. has every right to act as a rogue state.

To take a typical example, a few weeks ago U.S. special operations forces snatched a suspect, Abu Anas al-Libi, from the streets of the Libyan capital Tripoli, bringing him to a naval vessel for interrogation without counsel or rights. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry informed the press that the actions are legal because they comply with American law, eliciting no particular comment.

Principles are valid only if they are universal. Reactions would be a bit different, needless to say, if Cuban special forces kidnapped the prominent terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in Miami, bringing him to Cuba for interrogation and trial in accordance with Cuban law.

Such actions are restricted to rogue states. More accurately, to the one rogue state that is powerful enough to act with impunity: in recent years, to carry out aggression at will, to terrorize large regions of the world with drone attacks, and much else.

And to defy the world in other ways, for example by persisting in its embargo against Cuba despite the long-term opposition of the entire world, apart from Israel, which voted with its protector when the United Nations again condemned the embargo (188-2) in October.

Whatever the world may think, U.S. actions are legitimate because we say so. The principle was enunciated by the eminent statesman Dean Acheson in 1962, when he instructed the American Society of International Law that no legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its “power, position, and prestige.”

Cuba committed that crime when it beat back a U.S. invasion and then had the audacity to survive an assault designed to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba, in the words of Kennedy adviser and historian Arthur Schlesinger.

When the U.S. gained independence, it sought to join the international community of the day. That is why the Declaration of Independence opens by expressing concern for the “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

A crucial element was evolution from a disorderly confederacy to a unified “treaty-worthy nation,” in diplomatic historian Eliga H. Gould’s phrase, that observed the conventions of the European order. By achieving this status, the new nation also gained the right to act as it wished internally.

It could thus proceed to rid itself of the indigenous population and to expand slavery, an institution so “odious” that it could not be tolerated in England, as the distinguished jurist William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, ruled in 1772. Evolving English law was a factor impelling the slave-owning society to escape its reach.

Becoming a treaty-worthy nation thus conferred multiple advantages: foreign recognition, and the freedom to act at home without interference. Hegemonic power offers the opportunity to become a rogue state, freely defying international law and norms, while facing increased resistance abroad and contributing to its own decline through self-inflicted wounds.

Everybody on this planet knows very well that since WWII the US governments has managed to acquire the longest criminal record in the history of mankind.

Only the insane, the emotionally constipated and the long term victims of exactly the manufacturing of consent policies that Chomsky talk about in this interview wouldn’t see that.The American nation managed to go from a rather popular country to a widely hated country because of what US foreign-policy, the CIA-methods and the NSA-practices had developed into, in just a decade after the WWII.

They managed this primarily by saving, protecting, inheriting and developing the Nazi-policies, methods and tactics into American foreign policies and intelligence service’s methods and by justifying their existence through continuous bogus roomers and lies about non-existing threats, and through false-flag attacks. The infamous universal justification for aggression is the security of the nation and the safety of the citizens doctrines. Doctrines that only US, Israel and a couple of the former colonial powers in EU have the right to practice.

The whole post-war world had become pro-American and both in Asia, the Arab world and in Latin America people looked at the American Dream life-style that Hollywood, the American car industry, McDonald’s and Walt Disney promoted, and they deliberately connected these newly advertised, displayed and spread values and liberties as the modern democratic world’s step into a new era of freedom.

The USSR, the nation that actually fought the Nazis fiercely throughout the war and that had defeated them, had in the western world already been pictured and presented as the new cruel dictatorial state, “the threat to the free world”. So from then on everyone could easily compare what they had learned was trustworthy, adequate reports of facts, and what news they spread about the USSR and about America’s own rising pseudo-democratic, imperialistic super-power.

Although most thinking people in the world understands the difference between the American citizens and the American government, by now the world’s citizens sympathies are primarily on the side of the victims of America and Israel. And I have a strong reason to suspect that as long as young American’s continue to, quite non-critically, buy their government’s crap and really believe that they will implement democracy in this way, the further the generalization of American citizens will escalate and fewer and fewer will care about the lives of those who doesn’t care about ours.

The last 40 years of hate that American government policy and the different CIA-operations around the world, has provoked and brought upon themselves and the American people, is really NOT because people outside America “envy” their freedom or their “way of life”. Something that American officials and presidents always explains it with but they could never present a single survey that supported those highly ethnocentric assumptions. According to all American presidents since Johnson, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that USA have developed the most aggressive and lethal, globally spread, neo-colonial policies and legalized state-terror that one can find since the Nazis and the WWII.

Watch movies from other parts of the world from the 50’s and 60’s and see that from the Arab-world to the both Arctic regions and almost everything in between, apart from the USSR influenced parts people adored and copied American film industry, fashion and life-style. This, until the true backside of this coin became obvious through the Vietnam war and people could therefore see the lies and the fake promises of this new hypocritical super power.

It was two particular events that turned a big part of the citizens of the world against USA before the Vietnam war. The USA/UK-promoted Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the USA/UK interests in Iran and the toppling of the democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh. These both events helped the Islamic fundamentalist movements more than anything else had since its birth in 622 AD. Those two world events was the first indications and shocking evidences of a new real imperialistic terror-state rising in the post-war world.

Hitler’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and dictatorial excuses for ruthlessness and terror, was USA’s expressed reasons when they, first after two years of Nazi-rule in Europe, joined WWII. So it wasn’t at all “to save Europe” or to “fight for Justice and Democracy”. It was to not miss the geopolitical grab-and-scramble meal between England and the Soviet Union after the war. Roosevelt saw the chance to display himself and the USA as the saviors of Europe. This false assumption is what still color the view on USA to many Europeans. Except those who saw what USA was really after.

The August 14, 1941 Atlantic Charter established a vision for a post-World War II world, despite the fact the United States had yet to enter the War. The participants hoped in vain that the Soviet Union, having been invaded in June by her previous ally Nazi Germany, would adhere as well. In brief, the eight points were:

1. no territorial gains sought by the United States or the United Kingdom;
2. territorial adjustments must conform to the people involved;
3. the right to self-determination of peoples;
4. trade barriers lowered;
5. postwar disarmament;
6. freedom from want and fear;
7. freedom of the seas;
8. an association of nations.

Yeah, that worked out well! Actually, as a lip-service manuscript it still works out, for those who want to defend anything USA do today outside their borders and condemn anything the dissidents of US policies point at.

Nowadays, when we know about all the false-flag-operations, the proxy wars, the dehumanizing propaganda and the torture in American or American led detention and correctional facilities, it definitely looks like if they entered the war to slap the former “terror-experts” on their fingers, take-over their “terror-gurus” and their methods, tactics and rhetorical excuses for cruelty based on their pseudo-history and racist-logic.

Through the several thousands of Nazi and Fascist war criminals that the US army saved from the hands of the Red Army in the end of the war, they developed and established CIA, NSA and further developed FBI. To support that paradigm the EU was formed on Nazi-policies and by Nazis. Five years before Mr Holtstein became the first head of the EU, he was still in Spandau prison for war crimes.

Those who still refuse and deny to see this in the light of International Law, UN-conventions, the fundamental democratic principles and pure humanity, are as guilty to the atrocities of today as the Nuremberg Trials found the German citizens to be, who lived close to the 23 main extermination camps or any of the 1200 sub-camps. The citizens themselves claiming that they “didn’t know” or “couldn’t believe the roomers” still were taken by armed escort to the extermination camps to see the hills and piles of dead bodies.

The interviewer here, as well as the absolute majority of the western main stream media’s broadcasters, news anchors and “experts”, have hypocrisy ear-plugs on and most of them are victims of this kind of programming. The tops of the hierarchies in media are very aware of where exactly these policies are leading and they gain a lot by paving the way for such policies. “A hypocrite is one who condemn other peoples crimes, but refuses to look at his own crimes” says Noam Chomsky in this interview, and nothing could be more profoundly true nowadays and no other frequent, behaviour could manifest the racist-ideology’s rise so well as the western mass media’s tolerance and obvious promotion of clearly dehumanizing and misanthropic sentiments in the world.

In their broadcasting of 30.5.2015 by Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert drew parallels between austerity and policies imposed today by Germany in EU countries, with the austerity and other measures imposed on the colonies of the British Empire, which led to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and they are urging Greeks to declare their independence from the EU, the IMF and the cleptocracy of Brussels.

Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos is a third generation diplomat and former Ambassador of Greece to Canada, Poland and Armenia. He was Director General in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece and Secretary General of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization. Extremely knowledgable on issues of the EU and on what is happenning in Greece now, Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos was a junior diplomat in the team that negotiated Greece’s accession to the EEC. He is now against Greece’s membership to the EU and believes that the EU is destroying his country. He is a member of EPAM (Unified Popular Front), a movement that was founded in the wake of the protests of 2010 and 2011.

Julia Vladimirova met him.

“You were on the delegation that negotiated Greece’s accession to the European Community. Why are you now against it?”

” I was in the team that negotiated Greece’s accession to the EEC, as it was called then. The decision to join the EEC was taken in 1975 by Konstantinos Karamanlis and it was based on two political reasons : The first was to consolidate democracy in Greece, that had just been restored after a seven year dictatorship. The other was to give us some protection against Turkey that had just invaded Cyprus in July 1974. During that period the EEC was a serious organization. During the dictatorship it rendered enormous assistance to the democratic forces to fight against the military regime.”

“Now you want to take Merkel and Barroso to court and to leave the EU.What brought about such a radical change in your thinking?”

“In December 2009 I gave an interview to the Greek newspaper “Eleftherotypia” and the title of the interview was “Nightmare a fascist Europe”. It is true that the EU has become more and more undemocratic. It is no longer the democratic organization that we had joined back then. It is also destroying its member states. In Greece it is being done with the austerity measures that have been imposed upon us. Everything is being destroyed : our society, our economy, our culture, our education and our people. So why should we belong to an organization that destroys us. Only a masochist would. I would suggest that the EU be dismantled and be replaced by a new EU that would be working for the interests of the European people and not for the interests of the European bankers.”

“What advice would you give to the young people who believe in the EU? For example in Bulgaria we are also in crisis. There are protests in Sofia. All intellectuals, the elite, and also young educated people believe that their future lies within the EU and that it will help our country to reach higher standards, higher wages. What would you say to these people?”

“I would tell them to closely follow the events in Greece, since what happens to us most likely would happen to them. We are being told by the EU, that in order to become competitive, we must reach Bulgarian standards, as far as wages are concerned. However they will never tell you that you must reach Greek standards, but perhaps they might propose to you to reach Pakistani levels. However, I do not wish to impose my opinion upon them. Just let them follow the developments in Greece and reach their conclusions.”

“How was EPAM created? I know that it was created as a result of the protest movement of 2010.”

“EPAM’s members come from all aspects of politics. From the Communist left, center and right. It is a movement created by the demonstrations of 2010. It became a party about one and a half year ago. We participated in the first elections during the crisis and received 60000 votes or 1% of the total national vote, which can be considered as quite satisfactory for a six month old party. We believe that Greece needs a regime change. We do not recognize the debt or the memoranda. We support the formation of a provisional government and then the election of a Constitutional Assembly that will formulate the new constitution that would, for example, prohibit former politicians to run for parliament while allowing the new ones not to serve more than two terms and in this way end the profession of politicians. We shall also leave the eurozone as a first step and later on the EU. All those who have contributed to the destruction of the country will be tried. We shall also file charges against Brussels at the competent International courts for crimes against humanity, since about four thousand people have committed suicide because of the pressure of the crisis and also ask for reparations for the damage done. In brief this is the EPAM program.”

In politics, whoever can better influence the international media to push forward their views has the upper hand, say political communications insiders. And this isn’t just the case during election campaigns: in the European Union, decision-making power depends not only on the size of a given player’s economy, but also on how it deals with international media.

It’s no secret that in Brussels lies a well-oiled media machine, which can distribute information to all major media outlets across the continent in a matter of hours. The machine, which has risen in influence since the financial crisis broke in 2008, operates on the basis of maintaining the anonymity of journalists’ sources that feed it; one of the sacred principles of journalistic ethics.

However, here this principle of anonymity is also used to protect the Brussels media machine itself and ensuring it remains hidden from public view. No journalist in the Belgian capital is prepared to risk their job to expose how the system works, thus preserving a ‘code of silence’ around it.

The hard core

The most influential group in the Brussels media machine is made up of the euro zone’s ‘hard core’ bloc. This means the Permanent Representation of Germany, located in Brussels, and assisted by political and financial satellite countries of Germany: Spain, Portugal, Slovakia and the Baltic states (among which, Latvia currently holds the EU presidency). France and Italy have clearly less influence and access in this system.

In terms of collection and distribution of news, the main players in the system are the three major European-level media outlets: the agencies Reuters and Bloomberg, and the Financial Times newspaper. Whatever this group reports, all other media outlets in Europe rush to reproduce. Thus – intentionally or not – articles published by the group are spread widely.

Information that enters the Brussels media machine comes from three sources: people working inside the EU bureaucracy who monitor critical meetings (interpreters as well as civil servants), the politicians themselves (or their aides) and senior officials of the European institutions. These sources are used to satisfy the need for timely, exclusive coverage of news events, which makes journalists extremely competitive in pursuing information on what is discussed during these meetings.

The most common means of communication from these sources to journalists is SMS. When it comes to more detailed leaks though, journalists from the three main media players (together with others from mostly German and British outlets) are invited to an unofficial press conference and briefed. This has been the case for the past few months.

In these meetings, the person doing the briefing is very often an official that also works at the European Commission’s Spokesperson’s Service. Of German origin, this man sets aside EU etiquette as well as the theoretical neutrality of his professional position.

A recent example that highlights how well this system functions was in Riga, during the recent Eurogroup meeting. On April 23, Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis participated in a dinner with his colleagues, in order to prepare the issues for the forthcoming meeting. Everything proceeded normally. But the following day, the media ‘revealed’ highly aggressive rhetoric against Varoufakis from his colleagues during the Eurogroup meeting itself.

The alien

That same senior official of the European Commission, moments after the conclusion of the Eurogroup meeting, invited eight journalists for the ‘established’ daily informal press conference. “There was a lot of anger towards the Greek delegation,” a Brussels-based journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, told us. “When we asked about Mr Varoufakis’ position in the meeting, the official said ‘The guy lives on another planet’, and made derogatory gestures. This isn’t something we’ve seen before – neither from EU officials nor this particular person.”

An identical ‘update’ was given by two further EU officials, one working for the Eurogroup and one from a diplomatic mission of a Southern European country. “They were equally aggressive; trying to present Mr Varoufakis as an ‘alien’”, said the journalist, who was present during these discussions. “When we got to the heart of the matter concerning the Greek economy, the ‘sources’ refused to say any more. They just blamed Varoufakis.” These briefings were followed by tough statements from various ministers, echoing the German government’s point of view.

This specific information about the events of the Eurogroup meeting in Riga was published in all three aforementioned major media outlets, giving the impression of a war-like atmosphere at the meeting and breaking the unwritten rule of maintaining a professional distance from harsh words. Following these events, the Greek delegation decided for Varoufakis to not attend the planned dinner on the evening of April 24, to express his displeasure with the way his colleagues treated him and Greece. However, the ‘aggression’ from ministers, EU officials and the media did not subside. On the contrary, Reuters presented Varoufakis as “isolated”, simply because he did not attend the dinner, without asking for a statement from the Greek side. They also commented on Varoufakis’ decision not to wear a tie.

The go-ahead for this latest smear campaign was given by SMS, from a German official to a journalist at one of the three major media outlets. The journalist in question then called some of his sources in Athens in order to warn them what was coming.

The wall

During the Eurogroup meetings last February, the Greek government tried to breach the seemingly impenetrable ‘media wall’ being built around it. “The fact that the draft of Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s ‘decision’ was leaked by the Greek delegation, which essentially subverted debate on it, outraged many people in Brussels,” the journalist told us. “War was declared, and from that point on, the Greek positions were repeatedly leaked to Peter Spiegel of the Financial Times,” he added.

“Will Mr Varoufakis be able to survive the pressure?” asked the journalist. “At least Mr Tsipras still trusts him,” we replied.

“Then inform them in Greece, both the government and the people, that they can expect even more of these attacks,” he said.

Greece has, despite its own bravery and immense sacrifices throughout its modern history, continuously been hindered by the European empires, and now EU and US, from achieving what the Greeks clearly always has fought for. Themistocles’ Democratic Alliance of Athens aimed for it in the Battle of Salamis. The ”Friendly Companionship”, the freedom fighters against the Ottomans aimed for it, and the massive Greek Democratic Resistance, EAM/ELAS, against the occupying nazi and fascist armies, fought for it. The Greek people always wanted and will always want a truly Free, Independent, Sovereign and Democratic Greece, where the Justice is real and the Democracy panhuman.